Apsara in New York by Sokunthary Svay (review)

Sokunthary Svay's debut collection, Apsara in New York, inhabits multiple perspectives, spans generations, hops the Pacific three times, and borrows words from lexica ranging from Cambodian history to Western classical music. Svay balances this kaleidoscopic variation with recurring figures and structural choices that bind the collection together. The individual poems' lyricism and punch make Apsara a pleasure to read; Svay's attentive management of the tension between uniformity and variability across the book make it a pleasure to reread.

Apsara in New York proceeds roughly chronologically. The book begins with a Khmer family's flight from Cambodia in 1980 during the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. When the family arrives in the Bronx, the perspective of the poems, which had hovered among the family, settles more firmly on the daughter, the book's primary speaker. (That daughter is a version of Svay herself, as we learn in "No Others," a deft recreation of the simultaneously intimate and distancing language of an official refugee-processing document.)

Through the first half of the book, we accompany the main speaker through childhood and adolescence, including her formal training as a classical singer. These poems are loud and cacophonous, reflecting the family's experience of the Bronx: "Cambodian karaoke blares through a steel door. / … Jehovah's Witnesses ring on weekends. / … Windows keep out bugs / not midnight basketball games." Even when individual poems are not explicitly from a young person's perspective, their placement in the early part of the book heightens the extreme highs and lows of feeling that come with early life experiences. "The Khmer Speaks Through Palms," for example, homes in on both the most gentle and most brutal associations attached to the Khmer welcome gesture. The poem begins, "Sompeah / is when palms unite … index fingers kiss the chin"; it ends, "Nose of an ak-47 / grazes a daughter's bangs … Sompeah is when palms lock / against the chin … Sobs choked by bullets."

A similarly intense multivalence emerges in the voice of the speaker's mother and father, whose poems are written in an "imperfect" English learned relatively late in life—a voice which Svay renders with grace and confidence. The mother is wary and judgmental but also fiercely protective and loving, sometimes all within one stanza; the title of "Make Room for Tenderness" begins by parodying the father's judgmental attitudes but then digs deeper into the past traumas that shaped them.

With "Common Ground," around the midpoint of Apsara, the main speaker, now an adult, returns to Phnom Penh and the Takeo province of Cambodia, "author to father's childhood." Here the poems become quieter and more impressionistic, and the polyphony of speakers fades out, mirroring the primary speaker's own limits with language: an uncle tells her in Khmer, "Ah, she can understand, / but she cannot speak back." The pace slows, senses blend together into synesthesia:

Time slows down to the soft foldsof a monk's crimson robe in traffic.

…

Pulls of the bow resonate acrossmy ribcage and continents to you.

I am the longing in its timbre,the ache in the string's tension.

The final quarter of the book returns to New York, where the speaker becomes a mother herself, raising a young daughter. Her own mother's voice also returns, this time with less confrontation than communion: "Ode to Mother's Sarong" is the most closely observed poem about the mother, unfolding beyond her voice to describe her physical presence. The final poem in the mother's voice conveys palpable relief:

I take the pictureput on the facebookand everybody like it.I not know how to read beforebut now

       I GOOD.How you write "beautiful"?I want to write when I see the picture of my friendsay "how are you"

Posting a photo on Facebook seems so "unpoetic," but Svay brings home its meaning to this person: a way to rebuild connections torn apart by war and exile, a way to affirm one's own existence and beauty, a...