Book
This Body Mystery
This Body Mystery is a 2012 book of poems and paintings by the Cambodian American poet and artist Chath pierSath.[1][2] Its poems tell of people living with HIV and AIDS in Cambodia during the 1990s.[1]
About the book
The poems are written in the voices of people with HIV and AIDS.[1] PierSath has said the book is about how people come to accept their fate and their sickness.[1] The poems are portraits of figures from everyday life.[1] About twenty of pierSath's paintings appear alongside them, giving visual form to loss, suffering and recovery.[1] PierSath has said that although the book is small, it took him more than ten years to make.[1]
Background
PierSath was born in Battambang Province, Cambodia; Rain Taxi gives his birthplace as Banteay Meanchey Province.[2][1] He crossed the Thai border in 1979, at the end of the Khmer Rouge years, and emigrated to the United States in 1981.[2] He later returned to Cambodia for humanitarian work that included HIV and AIDS prevention education.[2] In his poems and paintings he portrays Cambodian communities and social inequality through remembered figures, and he has also shown work about people living with HIV and AIDS in exhibitions in Phnom Penh, Bangkok and Kunming.[2]
Publication
Abingdon Square Publishing issued the book in 2012 as a collection of paintings and poems.[2][1][3] It followed pierSath's 2009 collection After and came before his 2020 collection On Earth Beneath Sky.[4][2] It is available in paperback.[5] The book is on the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association's #myLowellbooklist reading list.[5][6] Two works from it appear in the anthology Out of the Shadows of Angkor.[3]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Rain Taxi, Intersections: an interview with Chath pierSath (March 11, 2014)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Wikipedia: Chath pierSath
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Out of the Shadows of Angkor, Related books
- ↑ Poetry Northwest: Part of That Secret
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Bookshop.org: CALAA Lowell book list
- ↑ CALAA: Cambodian writers book list