A Nail the Evening Hangs On, published in 2020 by Copper Canyon Press, is Monica Sok’s debut collection. The book moves through past, present, and dreamt futures of Cambodian diaspora.
Sok, daughter of refugees, puts the memories and stories of her family and community at the center of the poems, asking the reader to confront what history and the Khmer Rouge have done and continues to do generations later.
The poems in A Nail shapeshift, mythologize, and elude while still granting space and honor to what they divulge to the reader. To expose the wounds of time and memory is then, as these poems do, to have to form something anew: a place for these memories, their truths, and Sok’s own understanding of her family and self.
In an email interview, Monica and I talked about A Nail the Evening Hangs On, documenting our dreams, and making the ordinary urgent.
Mariah Bosch: How did you come to poetry and your personal voice? How do you tap into that voice when writing through collective history/memory?
Monica Sok: I came to poetry by writing really bad poems that rhymed. I probably came to my voice by asking myself, But what do you really mean? [Insert side eye]. And then I had to make my language work so much harder to get to the truth.
I don’t know if my personal voice makes its way into the collective memory of my first book. I had a lot of trouble giving myself permission to write about a history that I did not live through myself. Maybe readers can see me through the self-portraits and a few other poems, but for the most part I was writing to tell myself a story. I wrote persona poems so that these other characters or family members could speak to me. I was inviting them to leave that bubble of familial silence in order to help me write the book.
MB: What is the post-first-book space like for you? Do you find that you’re specifically writing toward a new collection, or seeing how individual poems begin to form something?
MS: I’ve heard that poets grieve once their first book is published. Maybe because you no longer have a private relationship to a book that you’d spent many years trying to write. I don’t grieve my book, but I probably neglect its feat. I grieve my friends though. To have lost two brilliant Cambodian writers [Kimarlee Nguyen and Anthony Veasna So] in one year is unthinkable.
I have been writing one word at a time, one line at a time. I called my mother the other day to ask for a recipe and as she transmitted the ingredients and cooking instructions to me over the phone, I wrote down her words verbatim. I counted that as writing for the day. None of my new poems have a destination, but I do feel like they are going somewhere.
MB: When I read through A Nail The Evening Hangs On, I kept thinking about transformation –it felt like the poems were unfolding and reshaping themselves in front of me. How does transformation or making leaps factor into your craft? It’s sort of a “chicken or egg” question, but does that transformative moment come to you initially? I’m thinking specifically of the poem “The Weaver” and that moment at the end: “… she’d tie it up / and let all the tired animals around her house / drink from her head.”
MS: I have noticed that a lot of poets gravitate toward “The Weaver.” That makes me happy, because the weaver is my grandmother, mythologized. Her name is Bun Em, and the book is dedicated to her. This poem is about her grief and depression.
When the weaver lets “all the tired animals around her house / drink from her head,” she’s being generous and turning her grief into nourishment for other creatures. I think that’s what she did as a weaver. In this way, transformations happen all the time. It doesn’t have to be extravagant. Just one decision the speaker makes can transform a whole poem. The reader has to believe it though.
MB: How do you engage with your dreams? I love the slight changes/the uncanny in “Recurring Dreams” and I know for myself, I try not to interpret my dreams as much as remember them or document them in some way, even if it’s just in a message to a friend. I wonder about that in how you write them into your work; even the real or the recalled feels dreamlike at times, especially in poems like “The Death of Pol Pot” where this major historical event has happened but still, we're left with an image of the speaker transforming into “a teacup / or a wooden chair painted red”.
MS: I write down dreams as they tell themselves to me. I write down as much as I can remember, trying to get the details and the order of events right––not interpreting them but documenting them, as you said. But I think there’s a little bit of freedom in figuring out how a dream takes shape on the page.
In “Recurring Dreams,” I deeply felt that each section could represent a whole generation. In “The Death of Pol Pot,” I was focused on history through the second-generation perspective without letting it overwhelm the child’s imagination. As a kid, my cousin always made me the villain in his home videos. He asked me to crawl into a huge pot, which he had found in the pantry of my auntie’s basement. I was too big, so he filmed me holding the lid on my head as I crouched on the floor and slowly stood up. The way he shot this scene really made me look as though I was crawling out of the pot. Later on, someone pointed out to me that the child speaker crawling out of the pot made them associate it with Pol Pot. I had no idea that the wordplay of “pot” had allowed me to make that connection for the poem.
MB: I know that feeling––hearing an interpretation of your poem and being surprised by it, or shocked you didn’t see something that another person picked up on. As you’ve continued writing, how do you consider interpretation of your work? Or do you think a lot about how the poems will be received after you’ve published them? There’s this ambiguous audience, and of course an intended one; how do you think about them when the poems are out of your hands?
MS: I think about the audience during my revision process, which is when I try to hold myself accountable to the histories, communities, and people I’m writing about. When the poem is out in the world, I let it go. I usually don’t think too hard about how people will respond to it. I just hope that my readers will take what is useful to them when they encounter the poem.
MB: There’s this sense of perpetuity I kept picking up throughout the collection––a feeling that these traumas are still being re-lived or retold, or that actions in the poems are still happening (running after Ratanak in Tuol Sleng, each family member writing their names in “Here is Your Name” – and to end the collection that way … incredible). Can you talk more about that? Or, maybe what I’m trying to ask is, do you feel that for you, writing these events this way allows you to keep coming back to them, or that you have “unfinished business” with them? That they continue because they aren’t resolved?
MS: I’m glad you picked up on perpetuity because intergenerational trauma is real. I don’t think trauma can ever be fully resolved, but it is possible to actively heal while learning to live with it. I’m sure that this theme will follow me, simply because it is a part of who I am. But let me be clear: It is not all of who I am.
I hope to turn toward my own dailiness to see what emerges. For example, the wind woke me up yesterday and the power went out early in the morning. Later when I walked outside, I noticed that a potted plant had been knocked to the ground. If you asked me even five years ago if I was going to write a poem about that, I would have said, No, it’s not urgent enough. But now I think it is. Because my everyday life matters.
MB: What do you hope emerges from this shift in thinking? How do you think we, as poets, can find this sense of urgency in the ordinary or magnify it into something worth excavating?
MS: Well, perhaps my sense of urgency was limited. I was really focused on addressing my history and familial silence. But I didn’t allow myself to write a love poem, you know? So, I hope this shift in my thinking allows my poems to become more alive and present. I don’t want to look back on history as much in my poems right now. I want to lose control of my creative process and move toward desire. I hope the poems grow wild in unexpected places.
Monica Sok is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of 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 from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Hedgebrook, Jerome Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Sok is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and teaches poetry to Southeast Asian youths at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California. She is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. [Author website]
Author photo by Andria Lo.
Mariah Bosch is a Chicana poet from Fresno. She is a poetry candidate in the MFA program there, where she is also a fellow in Juan Felipe Herrera’s Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio. Her work has appeared on Poets.org, Hobart, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. [Twitter]