Tag: Shawn Pavey

A Review of “What Is Left” By Bunkong Tuon

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Shawn Pavey Reviews

What is Left

By Bunkong Tuon

…

In What Is Left, part of Jacar Press’ “Greatest Hits” chapbook series, Bunkong Tuon brings us on his personal journey as a child refugee of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities in his homeland of Cambodia. As David Rigsby states in his insightful foreword, “Bunkong Tuon’s childhood took place in a country whose national life in the 1970s underwent unimaginable depredation at the hands of the Khmer Rouge: slaughter, torture, starvation, and the forceful smashing and separation of families.”

To set the tone for the entire collection, the titular opening poem, recently announced as a winner of the 2024 Pushcart Prize, begins:

What is left after war is the gratitude for what is left.
My dreams are filled with ghosts looking for home.
The dead speak to the living through my poetry.
Each time I write, I rebuild. Retrieve what was stolen.

Tuon, while being open about struggle and loss and deep, deep pain, infuses each of these poems with an almost incessant sense of hope. This is one of the most surprising aspects of this work: how Tuon navigates the telling of his story yet, somehow, gives the reader a sense that the life he leads now is both unexpected and a joy. However, as this first poem continues, Tuon, soberly, informs the reader:

Nothing is dead until I let it. English is not the language
Of my birth. It is the language of death. More bombs
Dropped on Cambodia's countryside than in Hiroshima
And Nagasaki. I was bombarded by this language.

I had no choice but to use it.

Tuon references, of course, the covert bombing of Cambodia by the United States from 1969 to 1973 designed to minimize the capabilities of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Tuon as a small child knows America as bombs, destruction, and death. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, more than a million people were executed – more than 13% of the country’s total population. Families were shattered and much of the country’s population fled the atrocities as refugees.

This is the historical backdrop for Tuon’s poems. The second poem, Under the Tamarind Tree, Tuon reveals a memory of sitting on the lap of an aunt – a child herself – witnessing the funereal rites performed by monks for his mother.

The tree stands still, quiet, 
indifferent. The house sways 
on stilts. 

Monks in saffron robes
and nuns with shaved heads,
lips darkened with betel-nut stain, 

sit chanting prayers 
for the child’s mother. 
Incense perfumes the hot dry air.

The image is heartbreaking but the true marvel is Tuon’s sparse yet musical language. He writes these poems with an almost journalistic detachment, avoiding the temptation to overwrite the emotional vulnerability. Tuon shows us, with his carefully chosen lexicon, the sheer tragedy and loss of this moment experienced by a child in the care of a slightly older aunt. The poem concludes:

Each time the child hears prayers
coming from the house, he cries;
each time he cries, the aunt, a girl herself, 
pinches the boy’s thigh.

It is that last line that shares with the reader the absolute cruelty of the moment. The funeral is witnessed as a result of institutional cruelty, but that tiny act of violence, the thigh-pinch of the aunt on the crying boy’s thigh shows that in that moment, there was little time to grieve. Survival of what lies ahead will require its own toughness.

The next few poems detail Tuon’s refugee journey. In “The Carrying,” he gives us a glimpse of their long journey – on foot – as his grandmother carried the small boy on her back to the refugee camp. In the poem “Gruel,” Tuon recalls a conversation with his uncle about survival.

“When you were young,
we had nothing to eat.
Your grandmother saved for you
the thickest part of her rice gruel.
Tasting that cloudy mixture
of salt, water, and grain, you cried out,
‘This is better than beef curry.’”

All my life I told myself I never knew
suffering under the regime, only love.
This is still true.

The last two lines of this poem may be the true heart of this collection. What carried Tuon through all of this tragedy and trauma was knowing he was loved by extended family members who gave him this, the only thing they had left to their names, this love and this belonging in love, desperate as it was. Tuon’s poem “Debt” shows us a glimpse of his father begging the Khmer Rouge, after they slaughtered children and cut open the bodies to eat the livers.

My father got down
on his knees,
clasped hands over head,
and begged them
for a sliver of a victim’s liver
so that I would not starve.
While everyone was sleeping
my father snuck into the kitchen,
stole a branch of coconuts,
and buried them in the woods.
Each time I cried from hunger
he disappeared into the night,
dug up a coconut,
gave me the juice to drink
and with dirt-encrusted fingers
spooned out the flesh
for me, his only child.

This terrible memory ends the poems specifically about fleeing terror. The following poems in the book deal with how Tuon built a life and is, in a way, relaying his experience to his children but, also, to the readers. There is a poem about how air conditioning in a library hurts to breathe after fleeing jungles. There are poems to his daughter and son. There are poems trying to find purpose in living and moving on from unspeakable loss.

And there is so very much hope.

This hope, deeply ingrained in every single poem, drives this collection. These poems are intimate, they are deeply personal, they reveal the vilest atrocities, and these poems do all that while holding tightly to hope and love and never once slip into maudlin self-pity. While these poems, at least on the surface, could be considered confessional, they never feel like confessional poems. Autobiographical, certainly, which is a type of confessionalism, but they avoid writing about emotion in favor of stark imagery. Tuon shows us the horror and despair and struggle of living through and in spite of the Khmer Rouge. He shows us the life he built because of the sacrifice of the family members who kept him alive. And, ultimately, Tuon shows us the joy that life can hold in contrast to experienced evil.

What Is Left 
by Bunkong Tuon, 
2024, Jacar Press. 
ISBN: 978-0-936481-56-2, 
28 pages.

About the Author: Shawn Pavey is the author of Talking to Shadows (Main Street Rag Press, 2008), Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6 (Spartan Press, 2015), and Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse (2019, Spartan Press) which was 1st runner up for the 2020 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. He co-founded The Main Street Rag Literary Journal and served as an Associate Editor. Recently, he was featured in the second anthology by THE NU PROFIT$ OF P/O/E/T/I/C/ DI$CHORD entitled, And Even If We Did, So What!? from OAC Books. His infrequently updated blog is at http://www.shawnpavey.com.


	

	

	




	
	

		
Shawn Pavey reviews “The Prettiest Girl at the Dance” by John Dorsey
				

					Posted on  by asitoughttobemagazine				


				

	

		


 


 


John Dorsey Tells Us of Pretty Girls


By Shawn Pavey


 


 


Book Review: The Prettiest Girl at the Dance by John Dorsey


Blue Horse Press, ISBN-10 : 0578818787, ISBN-13 : 978-0578818788


 


Reviewing John Dorsey’s work is never an easy task. The greatest challenge comes in finding new things to say about his consistently exceptional poems that, over the last decade or so, come with more frequency and ferocity. Dorsey is a prolific poet. His previous collection to this one, Which Way to the River? by OAC Books weighed in at just under 500 pages and only collected four years of work. Yet Dorsey still manages to create, in each poem, a fresh revelation about being human in a world moving so fast that people spin off to collect in convenience store parking lots, truck stop diners, and low rent tenements. These are John Dorsey’s people.


 


The subject of each of the poems in this collection are women he’s met – waitresses, lovers, passing acquaintances, and dear friends. I know this because I know John. I’ve witnessed the events in at least one of these poems, met some of the characters from others. To be considered a friend of John’s is an honor and one I don’t take lightly. But as a reviewer, I must set that friendship aside to speak honestly about this book. That, in this case, is the easy part.


 


The Prettiest Girl at the Dance is some of Dorsey’s best work to date. Victor Clevenger’s insightful foreword to this book makes the same assertion. It is a bold thing for either of us to say, but Dorsey’s legion of readers will most likely agree.


 


Let’s look at The Prettiest Girl in Austin, Texas:


 


claims to have the best ass

in the city


a perfect apple shape

for roaming hipster bars


this town used to be so cool


now she has to drink malt liquor

out of an empty bag

in an empty field


just to stay ahead

of the curve


 


As I wrote in the foreword to Dorsey’s 2019 collection, Your Daughter’s Country (also from Blue Horse Press) if one finds one’s self the subject of a John Dorsey poem, he loves you. But it doesn’t mean one is free from a little good-natured teasing. The subject of the poem above laments how “cool” only lasts long enough to be recognized. Once “cool” is overrun by “common,” we are, quite literally, sent to new pastures to find the thing we lost once everybody else found out about it.


 


Readers new to Dorsey’s work and longtime fans will delight in how much weight each of these poems carry in so few lines. There are only two poems in this collection that run longer than a page and none longer than a page and a half. Dorsey makes his verbs do the heavy lifting. His modifiers are sparse and absolutely necessary to paint his images. His use of imagery is damned near alchemical as he creates tiny little worlds where the reader and the subject interact. In The Prettiest Girl in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Dorsey writes:


 


had red hair & kind eyes

& wore a backless sundress

in the middle of february


she had a mind as big

as the milky way


& freckles all over her body

that kept me from writing

anything


 


It is in the small details where we see Dorsey paint vast canvases with a fine-tipped brush: sundresses, freckles, red hair – these are the words that create the thumbnail sketch that he fleshes out throughout this brief poem. Freckles become the Milky Way, all of the details combine to create a person that affects the poet so deeply that he cannot do the thing that defines him.


 


Another distinctive characteristic in these poems is that many contain a structural hinge, much like a traditional sonnet. While Dorsey rarely writes structured verse, he’s studied it plenty. Take  The Prettiest Girl in Fisherman’s Wharf, for example:


 


places her hand on my shoulder      

to keep my absent-minded legs

from stepping in front

of an oncoming streetcar


her fingers long and cool

like the summer breeze

remind me that I don’t die yet

want to die alone

or take the form

of a dying bird


i want to love her

just long enough

for a beer to get warm


just long enough 

to mean it


 


In a mere 15 lines, Dorsey takes us from mindlessly walking down the street to recognizing an act of kindness to contemplating his own mortality to falling in love “just long enough / to mean it.” The hinge happens in the line space before the next to last stanza. The three lines prior take us out of the moment and into the poet’s contemplative spinning out to his eventual end and back again. But he changes direction in those last five lines. What can the poet offer in thanks? Love, adoration, if only for the briefest time.


 


One could argue that in the title of this book and in the title of each poem, using the diminutive “girls” does a disservice to the subjects of these poems. That is a valid point, on the surface. After reading these poems, however, it becomes evident that Dorsey’s use of the term “girl” is intentional to portray a sense of the innocence of beauty, kindness, and feminine vulnerability and strength.


 


Dorsey’s view of these characters is also unflinching. In The Prettiest Girl in Kansas City, Missouri, Dorsey concludes:


 


working as a museum security guard

where she stole loose bills

from the donation box


to buy enough whiskey

to put in the baby’s bottle 

to help her make it

through the night.


 


This is an unflattering observation of somebody struggling to make it through the world the best she can with the tools available. Not all of Dorsey’s pretty girls are life-saving angels, their beauty might be hard for many of us to see. But John Dorsey sees beauty in everyone and that beauty permeates every single one of his poems.


 


The Prettiest Girl at the Dance is Dorsey at his best – telling entire stories with a handful of lines that are at once both intimate and universal. It is a quick read, but by no means light.


 


Shawn Pavey, February 12th, 2021


 


About the Author: Shawn Pavey is the author of Talking to Shadows (Main Street Rag Press, 2008), Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6 (Spartan Press, 2015), and Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse (2019, Spartan Press) which was 1st runner up for the 2020 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award.  He co-founded The Main Street Rag Literary Journal and served as an Associate Editor. His infrequently updated blog is at www.shawnpavey.com.