KSW Presents
KSW Presents is a bi-monthly reading series featuring emerging and recently established Asian Pacific American (APA) artists. Each reading carries a thematic topic exploring the intersections of race, language, social justice, LGBTQ+ issues, economic disparity and other contemporary issues within the APA community.
On Saturday, June 13, as part of API Cultural Center of San Francisco's United States of Asian America Festival, KSW Presents Aria Aber, author of Hard Damages (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and Monica Sok, author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press. 2020). Award-winning poets and children of refugees, their books explore the impact of inherited wars—Aber, through interrogating historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations, and Sok, through myth- and memory-making of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge regime.
As an Asian American community, many of us come together bearing the scars of violence, but our kinship ties are not based in this violence. Instead, they are based in love and recognition, in knowing the way our histories are informed by US imperialism and Cold War-era regimes. Our kinship is built on offering one another the lifelines we need to persist and thrive—because of this violence, despite this violence.
Opening the reading will be a special musical performance by APAture 2017 featured artist, Kohinoorgasm!
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Saturday June 13, 2020 3-5:00pm
Featured Artists
Aria Aber
Aria was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published in September 2019. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Muzzle Magazine, Wasafiri and elsewhere. A graduate from the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, where she was the Writers in Public Schools Fellow, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, Dickinson House, and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Aber is the Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College.
ABOUT HARD DAMAGE
Hard Damage works to relentlessly interrogate the self and its shortcomings. In lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments, Aria Aber explores the historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations. Drawing on material dating back to the 1950s, she considers the consequences of these relations—in particular the funding of the Afghan mujahedeen, which led to the Taliban and modern-day Islamic terrorism—for her family and the world at large.
Invested in and suspicious of the pain of family and the shame of selfhood, the speakers of these richly evocative and musical poems mourn the magnitude of citizenship as a state of place and a state of mind. While Hard Damage is framed by free-verse poetry, the middle sections comprise a lyric essay in fragments and a long documentary poem. Aber explores Rilke in the original German, the urban melancholia of city life, inherited trauma, and displacement on both linguistic and environmental levels, while employing surrealist and eerily domestic imagery.
Monica Sok
Monica 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.
ABOUT A NAIL THE EVENING HANGS ON
In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family's memory about the Khmer Rouge regime--memory that is both real and imagined--according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility.
Kohinoorgasm
Kohinoorgasm is the lo-fi experimental pop music project of queer, mixed, desi artist Josephine Shetty. Shetty uses minimal dance beats and susurrate vocals to create hypnotic environments in which she hopes listeners can reflect and replenish. Between one album, two EPs, and a recent single, her released songs address topics ranging from war crimes and abuses of governmental power to emotional exhaustion and body autonomy.