Tag Archives: Asian American poet

“Truths” – Poem by California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick

19 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in Poetry

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Korean American Poet Lee Herrick
Official Author Photo by Curtis Messer
Source: The Poet’s Official Website

My Poetry Corner January 2025 features the poem “Truths” from the poetry collection Scar and Flower (USA, 2019) by poet Lee Herrick, the first Asian American to serve as the tenth California Poet Laureate (2022-2024). Born in 1970 in Daejeon, South Korea, he was adopted at ten months old by an American couple. He grew up in Northern California where he attended Modesto Junior College and received his BA in English and MA in Composition and Rhetoric from the California State University, Stanislaus.

He lives with his wife and daughter in Fresno, Northern California, where he is an English professor at Fresno City College since 1997. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.

“Adoption is seen through Hollywood’s lens as purely and essentially as a blessing and a gift. Which in some way may be true, however adoption is also wrapped in trauma,” Herrick told Sara Ohler during an interview in May 2023 for The Rampage literary magazine.

Though blessed with a warm and loving family, he was struck with anxiety in 1989, during his senior year in high school and throughout most of college. Growing up among family members in the creative arts—his mother is a visual artist—he found relief in music and poetry. “You kind of just had to make do or things weren’t very helpful,” Herrick said. “‘Handle your business or be a man,’ so the arts and music was a great outlet for me.”

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“Cruel Radiance” by Cambodian American Poet Monica Sok

11 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Poetry, United States

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Cambodian American Poet Monica Sok
Photo Credit: The Chautauquan Daily

My Poetry Corner April 2021 features the poem “Cruel Radiance” from the debut poetry collection A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) by Cambodian American poet Monica Sok. Born in 1990 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Sok is the daughter of refugees. She is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and teaches poetry to Southeast Asian youth at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California.

Sok dedicates her poetry collection to her grandmother Bun Em who arrived in the USA in 1981, two years after escaping genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime with her four daughters and two sons. A master silk weaver, Bun Em’s loom, grief, joy, and perseverance infuse Sok’s real and imagined collective memory.

In “The Weaver,” Sok transforms her grandmother’s grief into nourishment for others around her. It made her happy / as she worked on silk dresses / and her hair never ran out. / Sometimes, when she was tired, / she’d tie it up / and let all the tired animals around her house / drink from her head. Her loom becomes an old friend and an ancestor she prays to in the poem “Ode to the Loom.” Her grief is re-imagined as nails falling like rain in the darkness, so that when her hair falls / not as rain does / but as nails the evening hangs on, / and her hands slip no longer / from silk but on walls in the dark / hall to her room…

As the daughter of genocide survivors, Sok grew up with familial silence. Her poems came out of silence, she told Danny Thanh Nguyen during an interview in May 2020. “I’m writing about the genocide, but I’m writing more about the inheritance of that trauma…. I had to give myself the permission to write the stories and I went into myth-making, tried to mythologize my family’s narratives.” But the narratives are not just about her family’s experience, she noted. Rather, she was working towards a collective history of all Cambodian families.

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