Corpse Watching

by Sarith Peou

Poetry. Asian Studies. In CORPSE WATCHING, Sarith Peou offers witness to the Cambodian holocaust of the late 1970s, which he survived, in language at once dispassionate and evocative. Upwards of a quarter of all Cambodians died between 1975 and 1979: "The river is swollen / The current is strong / Corpses float by all day long." As poet Ed Bok Lee writes in his forward to the book, "Beyond telling, in total, a personal story of devastation under Angkar, these poems serve as steadfast interpreters for a multiplicity of voices and intensely human emotions still seeping out of that nation's deepest wounds." Born in 1962, Sarith Peou is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975-1979) in which more than one quarter of the Cambodian population was killed. In 1982, Sarith fled to a refugee camp in Thailand. In 1987, he resettled in southern California, and, in 1993, he moved to Minnesota. He is now serving prison time in Minnesota. While incarcerated, he converted to Christianity, and earned a GED and an Associate of Arts degree. He has dedicated his life to education, and moral and spiritual transformation within the prison. He is completing his autobiography, tentatively titled Prison Without Walls. Ed Bok Lee is the author of Real Karaoke People, winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and Asian American Literary Award (Members' Choice Award).

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

One word to describe this collection is "searing." This book is about concete images, ones that burn and follow you long after you have finished reading the page. It operates mostly by way of narrative and continues inexorably, marching and mimicking the necessary aloofness that comes with being the survivor of an indescrible atrocity. The speaking "I" is at once a refugee, war victim, a camp laborer, all under the watchful and torturous eye of the Khmer Rouge. I have particular affection for this book as it is published by Tinfish Press, which takes time in the production of its collections. Corpse Watching is not different with screws acting as page binders. All in all, a wonderfully wrought and heartbreaking collection.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome production on this one, old school manual typewriter text, bound with screw-bolts separating the text from the photographs of prisoners executed under the Khmer Rouge regime. To (for) the reader, the binding makes it difficult to see the faces of these individuals. Disturbingly so. Alternately, the images comprise a concurrent separate text. These photographs were made available by Youk Chhang, Director of the Cambodia Documentation Center in Phnom Penh.

Blog review here: http://bjanepr.blogspot.com/2007/08/s...