Review of A Nail the Evening Hangs On
reviewed by Dorothy Chan
A Nail the Evening Hangs On
Monica Sok
Copper Canyon Press
February 2020
ISBN: 978-1556595608
88 pages
Memory, together with history and storytelling, play major roles in Monica Sok’s debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On. In this stunning book, Sok’s speaker explores a broad range of poetic forms while she presents her identity as a Cambodian American woman who is the product of refugees; pays respects to her familial history, allowing both past and present to simultaneously exist within each poem; and confronts Cambodian history under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. This collection is grounded by striking imagery that moves between past and present, allowing both the speaker and the audience to construct memory—and with these constructions, we get the full confrontation the collection embodies.
One example of this striking imagery is the “mosquitoes” in the opening poem, “Ask the Locals.” These “mosquitoes” are a metaphor for the “so-called revolutionaries / who wanted so-called Year Zero so bad” and who “turned into mosquitoes.” The collection begins with these metaphorical characterizations that immediately foreground the politics and history inherent in the book. By choosing to open the narrative with a metaphor, Sok creates an image that transcends time while emphasizing a brutal history. The metaphor of the “mosquitoes” is also one the audience can truly “feel.” In addition, Sok’s speaker makes a crucial distinction early on, characterizing these “so-called revolutionaries” as “mosquitoes” as opposed to “butterflies” or “moths”:
Because not butterflies or moths rolling
in the mass graves—we all know the moths are children
who didn’t make it past five. My theory is those creeps
suck the blood of their victims to forget
with their bare hands or with other kinds of hands,
the kinds with teeth. They forgot. Don’t forget: If you
scratch your arms like that, a huge welt will appear—
a rash, and those mosquitoes will keep coming.
Sok’s poem moves into a sensory territory: we may metaphorically “see” these “mosquitoes,” but what is more powerful is how we end up “feeling” these “mosquitoes” through the “scratching” of our arms, while the speaker warns us, “Don’t scratch their real names” and “Don’t bend. / Slap.” As a result, Sok’s imagery is truly synesthetic. The poem may open with a metaphorical image, yet we are viscerally transported into the speaker’s familial memory and mindset regarding Year Zero and the Khmer Rouge regime.
Another arresting feature of Sok’s imagery is how it fills in the gaps in time and arguably creates time within the text. A particularly notable poem is “The Death of Pol Pot,” which is in two sections and takes place in 1998, the year Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died. In the first section, the speaker narrates, “My mother shoos us away / but I listen by the door. // There are rumors of a black snake / in the basement. It is 1998. // The adults watch the news upstairs. / On the screen, an old man is dying in his bed.” The speaker, in 1998, is unaware who Pol Pot is, and identifies him as the “old man” who is “dying in his bed” and whom her parents and the other adults hate. Sure, 1998 may historically mark the death of Pol Pot, but how the speaker in this poem, looking back, identifies the year is through the “rumors of a black snake / in the basement,” which viscerally places us in the poem’s setting. It’s the unexpected presence of the snake in the basement that brings the poem and flashback year to life.
What’s also salient about “The Death of Pol Pot” is how time moves. While the first section presents a child’s perspective of a pivotal historical event witnessed by adults, the second section plays with the slowing down of time as the speaker and her brother play games: “I crawl out of a giant steaming pot / snickering to my brother. // He always plays the victim. / I love to do the evil laugh.”
A beautiful accompaniment to “The Death of Pol Pot” is “Tuol Sleng,” which is a poem in numerous parts, comprising the entire second section of the book. In the epigraph of “Tuol Sleng,” Sok gives us the necessary background information: “Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is the site of former Chao Ponhea Yat High School, which the Khmer Rouge used as the notorious S-21 execution center from 1975 to 1979.” Settings that waver between past and present scenes play a major role in Sok’s entire collection, and here, we witness this beautiful interweaving. In the first section, the speaker states,
In this same place,
did they kill Yuos Samon?
We know they dented metal bed frames,
chained prisoners in schoolrooms.
Before the slow act of torture
each prisoner’s photo was taken
with a film camera. Flash.
The “flash” on this first page is what signifies the interweaving of past and present. While the speaker questions if this is the site where Yuos Samon was killed in the past, the poem is further brought into the present moment with scenes of the speaker’s nephew running the halls: “My nephew springs down the halls, ducks his head / into every classroom.” This image of the nephew running is repeated throughout the poem. On the poem’s fifth page, the poet presents an intriguing moment: an image of a boy, now unnamed, runs through the halls of Tuol Sleng. And in another move that unifies past and present, the speaker concludes this section with, “He sits on a chair and waits. When I walk in, / he whispers, ghost. The bell rings and off he goes.” The fact that here the boy is unnamed is key. The whispering of “ghost” not only works with the site of Samon’s death, but also as an eerie characterization of childhood innocence and honesty.
Familial memory is further solidified in the collection’s final poem, “Here is Your Name,” which ends with,
But he’s still up there in that tree
and here you are still writing your name
and your brother’s name, now your mother’s
and father’s names, as though writing them
might make your names true.
The repetition of the speaker’s action of writing down family names emphasizes both the poem’s (and the collection’s) theme of family memory as permanent—stories and histories are passed down through the sheer act of repetition. Sok concludes the collection with the speaker holding onto her loved ones’ names as we recall the various emotional images of familial history and memory. In the end, what gives the speaker and her family the most power is their name: “as though writing them / might make your names true.”
Monica Sok (@monicasokwrites) is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of former refugees. She is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her work has been recognized with a "Discovery" Prize from 92Y. She has received fellowships and residencies from Poetry Society of America, Hedgebrook, Elizabeth George Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, Jerome Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Currently, Sok is a 2018-2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has taught poetry to Southeast Asian youths at Banteay Srei and the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California. She is originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Dorothy Chan (@dorothykchan) is the author of Chinese Girl Strikes Back (Spork Press, forthcoming), Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, March 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She is a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University, a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and her work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Poetry Editor of Hobart. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com.