POET. WRITER. editor. INSTRUCTOR.
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“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. She fills (literal and metaphorical) holes with with canny, sensitive, brilliant fictioning. Brava, selamat, an ovation for these three acts.”
KHAIRANI BAROKKA, author of Ultimatum Orangutan
“Evocative and haunting, Cynthia Dewi Oka’s A Tinderbox in Three Acts is a choral undertaking … that 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. At its center churn insurmountable, incomprehensible brutalities. These are the facts. But Oka and her fellow organizers, researchers, artists, carriers of this history are also facts. With imagination and the sharpest tools, she cuts opening after opening into the page. 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.”
REI MAGOSAKI, “Best Asian American Books of 2022,” Soapberry Review
"Oka delivers a collection that is at once a remembrance and a revolution.”
EVAN WANG, 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.”
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“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.”
Heidi Tandiono, International Examiner
“It is a credit to Oka that she never settles on what’s easy or simple. Even the most guttural emotions have complexity and nuance… Oka’s speaker may be grappling with purpose, and point, and how any of it matters. But her poems leave me believing everything does.”
ROGAN KELLY, 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.
publication highlights
Image by Trent Parke / Magnum.
"FOR THE CHILD(REN) I CANNOT CARRY” IN THE ATLANTIC
…I want you to know that there were moments staying
was easy. That I do not regret any of my wishes, even when
I have denied them. For years after the diagnosis, I could not
remember the name of the border inside me. Thanked the lean-
in zeitgeist that what hurts me is my salvation.
“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 via KARRASTOCK // Getty Images.
“Far from the son” in oprah daily
A brown-skinned woman with close-cut hair is standing in a metal room, facing a metal door. Millions of miles away from Earth, this door is all that separates her from lightless, airless space. Her teenage son watches her through a glass pane from the adjoining hallway. The woman’s mind is made up. She injects blood oxygenator into her thigh and pushes a button; the door slides open. Barefaced and suitless, she shoots out of the ship like an arrow through the vacuum between stars.
“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.