In this collection of essays and musings, artist Sokunthary Svay offers vignettes of a life lived attuned to the ways the body leads us toward truths stored within our corpuscles. We are more than past traumas that bend our bodies toward survival impulses, as Svay posits in powerful prose; our bodies have the intellect and capacity for self-healing, and the chosen outlet for Svay is through song. We are all so lucky to hear the music of her heart. - Putsata Reang, author of Ma & Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

In Put It On Record: A Memoir-Archive, Sokunthary Svay's writing seeks in singing. Maybe it's a strange song that turns on a dime to face what haunts. But this haunting disappears as soon as it appears, so the writing turns again, a new song. And again. Pages likewise turn, and genres blur: in memoir a child gives birth to a mother who struggles, who longs, again, to sing through an inaudible suffering. In false starts and true pitch, in opera and in poems and photos, Khmer daughters lose hold of fathers and mothers find each other in the eyes of the lost. Strangers become mothers to each other and confess things lovers hide in their mirrors. Languages collide and implode, songs unsing themselves and history rewinds to reveal, again and again, the terror of revolutionary disaster. Trying to find a home in exile and often finding themselves exiled at home, Sok's selves and ciphers toggle between an Asian immigrant's fear of racist violence and white indifference and the living spectre in Khmer memory of "being killed by those who resemble us, by those who are us." It makes perfect sense, if we dare to let it: the way Sokunthary Svay's beautiful book flies apart in order to hold the song together. - Ed Pavlic, author of Call It in the Air

"Sokunthary Svay's Put It On Record surveys a wide breadth of form and expression. The collection speaks to the multiplicities of selves that each of us embodies, yet it is also a window into one artist's deeply personal experience. It is suffused with echoes of the longing and struggle that resonate through the Cambodian diaspora."-VADDEY RATNER, New York Times bestselling author of In the Shadow of the Banyan and Music of the Ghosts

Not your typical memoir, Put It On Record is a journey meandering stories of shared ordeal of womanhood and uprooted tales told in a captivating and well written verses and poetry. It is impossible to put the books down as Svay's uncanny ability to bring us into her world, more than just the immigrant experience but a shared humanity of being and existing. We are changed after reading her book either by connecting through her vulnerability or simply by having a glimpse into the Cambodian American world. - LinDa Saphan, PhD. Anthropologist, Author of Faded Reels, Associate Producer of Don't Think I've Forgotten and Fulbright Scholar