POET. CREATIVE FACILITATOR. NARRATIVE STRATEGIST.
available now.
“This, this, this is a book that so many have been waiting for. Cynthia Dewi Oka writes in a lineage of defiant artists who were killed, exiled, or otherwise hurt for taking on this subject, and this book is a freedom - scalpel-cut from the tangled, corporeal forest of intergenerational trauma, from Western complicity in the 1965-66 genocide and the decades of violence after.”
KHAIRANI BAROKKA, author of Ultimatum Orangutan
“Evocative and haunting, Cynthia Dewi Oka’s A Tinderbox in Three Acts…refuses the trickery of objectivity, and is instead frank in its imaginings, in its need for imagining. Bringing this imagination of poetry to bear on the imaginations of fascism and genocide, this stirring collection is not an argument of equivalence, but of the many forms of risk we undertake in being with each other."
SOLMAZ SHARIF, author of Customs
“I cannot say enough how critical this work is for its history, specificity, and devotion… This book is a fire. A ceremony. An unburying.”
ARACELIS GIRMAY, Editor-at-Large for Blessing the Boats Selections
“Keenly observant and deeply imaginative, the collection rings as an elegy which resists easy narrative clarity and coherence of an irrepresentable historical event. Readers are to simply listen, mesmerized.”
“Best Asian American Books of 2022,” Soapberry Review
"Oka delivers a collection that is at once a remembrance and a revolution.”
The Dawn Review
“[A] deliberate and effective counter-public to the colonial histories that perpetuated silence around the genocide for decades... [o]ne thing that sets Oka’s collection apart is the overarching sense that the poem’s speakers are continuously aware of their participation in creating alternative histories.”
“‘The Indonesian official record is a ghost,’ Oka writes, and these poems allows her to reimagine the pain, fear, and terrible bargains Indonesians experienced in a tumultuous political climate... Oka’s powerful collection asks readers to engage with a historical reckoning.”
availABLE NOW.
“In Fire Is Not a Country, the devotional is alive and freed from those who have abused it … I kept this book by my pillow for weeks. Night after night, I returned, wanting to experience it again.”
JENNY ZHANG, author of My Baby First Birthday
“Funny, heartbreaking, filled with terror and degree of rigorous compassion one rarely sees in poems, Fire Is Not A Country achieves a formal range and virtuosity that really brought me to understand what the idea and practice of witness can mean in the hands and heart of a truly visionary poet.”
GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI, author of Rocket Fantastic
“Sensitive to the ways women often wear all of the hats—here poet, critic, director, and dramaturge—Oka is an auteur allergic to pre-packaged emotions… These poems help us map ourselves in a society where 'having a body is not the same thing as being seen.'"
GREGORY PARDLO, author of Digest
"Across a range of playful styles, Oka’s third collection favors talkative lines that chew on themes of global unrest and the Indonesian American heritage that 'lives like a witch in my house, turning the rice / yellow.'"
GREGORY COWLES, New York Times
“Oka challenges the perceptions of “us” versus “them” as she takes the audience on a journey about what it means to be seen or understood beyond the physical realm.”
International Examiner
“Oka’s speaker may be grappling with purpose, and point, and how any of it matters. But her poems leave me believing everything does.”
The Night Heron Barks
“[T]here is something exceptionally brilliant about this collection’s attention to fatigue, to the body overwhelmed, to the idea that one should not have to be or perform super humanness in order to survive… Oka corroborates the unheard.”
check out the fire is not a country ep with original music by paul oka.
highlights
Image by AFP.
Hind Rajab was a six-year-old Palestinian child who, alongside her family members, was killed by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza in January 2024 while they were attempting to evacuate.
"AS THOUGH IT WERE A SMALL CHILD” IN POETRY DAILY
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I mean, organize my body around what cannot be spoken.
“the capacity” IN pank
The day you and your dad find out you’re both pregnant is the day the last of the leaves fall from the trees. The whole world, all of a sudden, loses its cover, the jades and emeralds of the generous seasons, the golds and vermillions of the lean ones.
Issue cover art by Roger Camp.
Image by AFP.
“AMERICAN ABYSS” in POETS.ORG
…I followed here my own
forgetting of the fireflies that blink
like prayers in belligerent grasses; my
dreams of mattering, as in, appearing—
a noun in your syntax. That stone
you strike for water.
“Future Revisions” is a collaboration with Philadelphia Contemporary, Asian Arts Initiative, and Friends of the Rail Park. It was installed July 2021 at The Rail Park (12th and Callowhill) in Philadelphia.