Collateral Journal

In our soon-to-be-archived issue, you’ll find two new poems from Bunkong Tuon, each of them looking at what it means to survive and escape deadly regimes, then exist in safer spaces with those memories and uncertainties afterward. The concept of survival during genocide reaches beyond the physical body of a survivor and into their every relationship and action, no matter how tender, how loving. This poem, “Eating Donuts with my son at Dunkin’”, is a window into that reminder. Link to both poems is in our bio.

“As a child survivor of the Cambodian genocide, I grew up without parents. Now that I’m a parent, I raise my kids, consciously or unconsciously, in the shadow of Pol Pot.” —Bunkong Tuon

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize-winning poet, and professor at Union College in Schenectady, in NY. He is the author of several poetry collections. In 2024, he published What Is Left, a Greatest Hits chapbook from Jacar Press, and Koan Khmer, his debut novel from Northwestern UP/Curbstone Books. He lives with his wife and children in Upstate New York.

The relationships we forge between seemingly distant cultures, genders, generations, and histories of war are the birthplace of human healing and accountability. So we protect them, cling to them, reflect on them. This new fiction from Wayne Karlin is a glimpse at what that reflection feels like, and we appreciate it especially now, when so much of our daily life and news consumption encourages us to isolate ourselves and avoid each other. Read it at the link in our bio.

“‘A Red Thread’ is one of a series of stories I’ve been writing concerning the cross-generational damages of war on families, triggered by seeing how some of my own experiences as a Vietnam veteran were echoed in the experiences of several of my students, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the period 2005-2010, while I was teaching at a community college. Several of those veterans had fathers who were also Vietnam veterans and I wondered what we had not been able to teach our kids, and our country, about how dear the cost of that failure was.” —Wayne Karlin

Wayne Karlin has published nine novels, a collection of short stories, and three non-fiction books. He has received several State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Paterson Prize in Fiction, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in the Arts Award, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction.