Thomas Wexler | (re)View of 1975 by Eryk Wenziak
Eryk Wenziak’s warring words are perpetrators/victims, guilty/innocent, bound dependently in depravity and suffering. They embrace, then struggle to escape confinement, jarring and unsettling as the actions they portray. We are assaulted. Destabilizing gestures strip familiarity and comfort, testing what is communicable the way the horrors of the Khmer Rouge test human resilience. Stark, urgent repetition is either threat or plea – “KILLING FIELDS, KILLING FIELDS, DON’T KILL MY BABY.” Radical, reconstituted documentary speech, 1975 confronts the tortured silence that has accompanied the ever-present legacy of the genocide in Cambodia. The poem’s conclusion emerges like a strange, sad song. Bones “speak” a “human truth,” traumatized villagers can hear years later, ultimately a sign of hope as Cambodia works to reclaim its culture, with members of the Khmer Rouge finally being judged by a tribunal.
//1975 by Eryk Wenziak can be found online at Deadly Chaps Press (http://www.deadlychaps.com/1975.html)//
xlviii | SF&D