Book
Gruel
Gruel is the first full-length poetry collection by Bunkong Tuon, published by NYQ Books in 2015.[1][2] Tuon calls it an autobiography in free verse, from his childhood flight from the Khmer Rouge to his life as a writer and professor in the United States.[3][1]
About the book
The narrative poems trace a boy who loses his mother under the Khmer Rouge, a grandmother who risks her life to steal rice for her grandson, and an uncle beaten by Thai military police for fishing at night outside a refugee camp.[1][4] Later poems follow an aunt who leaves the East Coast to buy a donut shop in California, a father who lives through the genocide again in memory, a young man who finds Charles Bukowski in a Long Beach public library, and a professor teaching students about war at a private college in Upstate New York.[1] The book is arranged in sections that include "East Coast," "West Coast" and "Cambodia."[4]
In the title poem, a grandmother saves the thickest part of the rice gruel for her grandson when the family has little to eat.[4] Tuon has said the poem is about his grandmother's love and her protection of him from the Khmer Rouge.[3] The collection's themes are memory, ghosts, personal loss, historical trauma, displacement and home, self-invention, love, sacrifice and hope.[1]
Publication and editions
Tuon built Gruel over about ten years from Under the Tamarind Tree, an earlier autobiography he finished in graduate school; a section of it, "Cambodia: Memory and Desire," appeared in The Massachusetts Review.[3] NYQ Books published the collection on June 25, 2015, in 130 pages.[1]
- ISBN 978-1-63045-006-9; Library of Congress Control Number 2015942607[1]
Reception
Chanrithy Him called the book hauntingly beautiful, a portrait of the longing for love and normal life after war and loss.[1] The poet Afaa Michael Weaver wrote that it speaks to universal human trauma and to the ability to love in spite of the dangers of attachment.[2]