![]() ![]() Memory 'is long / and bendy.' This book is full of prisms to behold and textures to touch and so the rewards are manifold and delicious. Sometimes images precede meaning and sometimes meaning creates images. The ancestors are calling and calling and calling. ![]() ![]() Ghosts live vicariously through the living. Sorrow is subterranean and always fighting valiantly to come to the surface. ![]() Reverence is as honorable as irreverence. In Fire Is Not a Country, the devotional is alive and freed from those who have abused it. "Reading Cynthia Dewi Oka is an EXPERIENCE. We’re holding a line and we’re losing, I am aware, but from a certain vantage, Cynthia Dewi Oka’s poems fill me with hope, which unlike fire, is in short supply." -Rogan Kelly, The Night Heron Barks " Fire Is Not a Country is a personal triumph, a prophetic and damning truthsayer for our times, and an essential read for the revolutionary and the poet. "At a moment in contemporary poetry when there is so much rousing energy for strength and calls to action, there 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." -Megan Fernandes, Harriet Books "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, the New York Times ![]()
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