Apsara in New York

Poetry collection by Sokunthary Svay, Khmer writer and musician from the Bronx, New York. She and her family were refugees from Cambodia who survived the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.

"Sokunthary Svay's Apsara in New York is truly like no other poetry collection I've read. Transnational and pan-ethnic in scope, the book begins in a refugee camp in Thailand, settles in the Bronx and, driven by memory and desire, returns to the Cambodian cities of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and Takeo. The poet is both fierce and tender, street-smart and thoughtful, maternal and filial, political and haunted. With No Others, Svay emerges as a powerful new voice in Cambodian-American poetry."

Bunkong Tuon, author of Gruel and associate professor of English, Union College