Books by Bunkong Tuon

And So I Was Blessed weaves together three narrative strands: a tourist visiting Viet Nam, a son sojourning to his father's village in the Mekong Delta, and a professor leading his students on a term abroad, all for the first time. Running throughout this poetry collection is the refrain of the central character-the tourist, son, and professor-missing the daughter he left behind. This is a book about history and memory, tourism and education, arrival and departure, loss and alienation, longing and misrecognition, and above all, a father's love for his daughter.

In his first full-length collection, GRUEL, Bunkong Tuon documents the lives of Cambodian refugees and explores the poetic landscape of a Cambodian America. Written tenderly, with honesty, intelligence, and occasional humor, GRUEL is populated by survivors such as a boy who loses his mother to the Khmer Rouge regime, a grandmother who risks her life to steal a few grains of rice for her grandson, an uncle who is beaten by Thai military police for night fishing outside a refugee camp, an aunt who leaves the East Coast to buy a donut shop in California, a father who re-experiences the traumas of the Cambodian Genocide, a young man who discovers Charles Bukowski in a Long Beach public library, a professor who teaches about the horrors of war to college students at a private college in Upstate New York, to name a few. It's a book about memories, ghosts and haunting, personal loss and historical traumas, losing and finding home, discovery and self-invention; above all, it's a book about love, sacrifice, and hope.