Corpse Watching

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.