In Thailand It Is Night
In Thailand It Is Nightreminds us that poetry holds both nostalgia and instructions: we dream of the future while wearing the garments of our fathers. Ira Sukrungruang's new collection is surprising and clear at every turn. ---Stephen KuusistoIn Ira Sukrungruang sIn Thailand It Is Night,the afterlife is where the streets bustle with the sounds of a backfiring motor and where the surprise of peacocks in the middle of the city fan out their blues and greens despite the strangeness of the paved walkways. Within, Midwest winters are warded off by palpable memories of home while the complexities of love and the world are recollections blossoming from the mind as dogs howl at the bitten moon. A vast statue of Buddha houses wintering birds in its ears. Their songs are Sukrunguang's poems which travel the curved path from the brain into the heart. ---Oliver de la PazTo read the poems inIn Thailand It Is Nightis to encounter a speaker who knows that poetry lies deeply embedded in the body, and in the litany of breath itself. Sukrungruang has limned an extraordinary collection couched in the broken language of immigration and the mystical language of reincarnation, a book that is as dreamy as it is resolute. Deeply rooted in the landscape, these poems define emotion using the riches of the natural world: finches and cranes and crows, geckos and tree frogs and cardinals and moths these creatures weave longing, memory, and family into an intricate, lyric-narrative web. My palms are up, writes Sukrungruang, and this gesture signifies how open his poetry is to the world, to the simultaneous beauty and suffering it brings. ---Erika Meitner