“We / tied the children to the elephants of / our hearts, sent them / small / swaying / to the Country of Wanting.”
-from FIRE IS NOT A COUNTRY
books
"More probing, engaged and profound than many a contemporary novel, Cynthia Dewi Oka’s A Tinderbox in Three Acts demonstrates how a gifted poet can explore the often painful complexities of history, personal and public, with true originality. Utilizing lyric, narrative and documentary poetry, as well as drawings and nonpoetic forms with supreme skill, Oka both fills in the holes of the fictional story, centered on the horrific 1965 suppression of Indonesian Communists and the broader Left under General Suharto, with Western complicity, that she has set out to understand, and provides a needed model for 21st century poetry and poetics."
JOHN KEENE
"Cynthia Dewi Oka is a filmmaker. And yes there are screenplays in this text. But Oka is a filmmaker because of what she does with poetry, how she uses image to bring us in close, to make a whole landscape out of a grain of sand, out of the collar of a shirt. How does she bring us so close and yet show us everything. These poems are intimate worlds of political possibility. Cynthia Dewi Oka is directing these cinematic lifeworlds, but she is also the grip holding us so we can see, she is also the set designer taking everything apart and putting it back together so we know, so we know that this world is not given, it is made. And we can remake it."
ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS
"I love this book's invention, as Dewi Oka summons up the courage to rage and grieve: 'Let memory make of me a scream that wasn't there.' What a powerful plea! I love the many kinds of tenderness on these pages, Oka's attentiveness to detail, the wonderful gift of seeing poetry in the custodial, in the tragic: so even if tears come, they are 'like small stubborn / gods refusing to fall.' I love the mythical depth, the civic outcry, the lyric inventiveness of these poems. But most of all, I love how beautifully music is made patiently from the sorrow, how a human 'holds his breath, secretly / chains to a single note all the mutinies inside him--'. A powerful book.”
ILYA KAMINSKY
"Starting with the redaction of Rilke's verse, Cynthia Dewi Oka's revision goes beyond a line here, a comma there. In the 2nd edition of Nomad, Oka places us in the middle of a textual journey, a reexamination of the self, a labor intensive that extends beyond any wage legislated by patriarchy and fake liberalism. Oka has revisited her body (of work) with an intentional force that reclaims our losses and a skin-shedding so necessary that it redefines poetry. The lyricism in Oka's poetry is enough to split a canonical rock open."
WILLIE PERDOMO
The end of the world is not new to the characters who inhabit Oka’s writing; their lives have already been shaped by intimate versions of it—violence, illness, heartbreak, financial precarity … This is the place where Oka writes from—a place of urgency, of fire, of meteorites that crash on the face of the earth.
nay saysourinho, ploughshareS
POETRY
“Ma: A Multidisciplinary State,” a visual poem commissioned by Adi Magazine for their Fall 2020 Issue, Policy Recommendations: Poets Intervene.
“Mangostectomy” by Cynthia Dewi Oka (2021).
ONLINE
For Wanda Maximoff, Who Stands Accused of Necromancy. LEON Literary Review.
For the Child(ren) I Cannot Carry. The Atlantic.
First Poem After Parting. The Atlantic.
Poet, Formerly Known as Activist, Formerly Known as Child of God. The Massachusetts Review.
The Year of the Shoe. Poetry Society of America.
Meditation on the Worth of Anything. Poetry Daily.
Manifest. POETRY.
Acela Express and Erasure of Combat Liberalism by Mao Zedong… Iterant Magazine.
That’s What She Said. The Rumpus.
Art of Revision. Court Green.
The Roots Do a Live Cover of Mayfield’s “Move On Up"; Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda and Portrait of My Father as a Pianist. Academy of American Poets.
Ma: A Multidisciplinary State. Adi Magazine.
For My Father Who Once Rubbed Shoe Polish Over His Bald Head. Leon Literary Review.
Ode Where Milk Was Rare. Zócalo Public Square.
In Europe, My Mother Wears Shades. PRISM International.
21 Lessons in the Art of Embouchure. Tupelo Quarterly.
You Don’t Have to Be Tough All By Yourself; Zuihitsu with Love for the Moon’s Failed Rebellion; and Protege. Scoundrel Time.
Recurring. wildness journal by Platypus Press.
Pastoral in Which a Deer’s Thirst is the Tragic Hero.” Hyperallergic.
Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda and Portrait of My Father as a Pianist. Academy of American Poets.
Because I Come from a Lack of Knowledge. American Poetry Review.
Elegy with a White Shirt and On ‘Elegy with a White Shirt’. Kenyon Review.
The American Dream Writes to Orpheus. The Massachusetts Review.
For Khalil, First Responder, Whose Name Means ‘Friend’. Dusie, the Asian Anglophone Edition, p. 181.
Pulses, From a Talisman’s Perspective, and Breach. Painted Bride Quarterly.
The Argument. The Collapsar.
Migrant Is Not a Metaphor. Guernica.
Elegy for Red. The Wide Shore: A Journal of Global Women’s Poetry.
Tabuh Rah and Though We Have No Chance for Escape, Encore. Apogee Journal.
After Hurricane Sandy and Gentrify This! Kweli Journal.
Merapi and Arboretum. Terrain.org.
Amulet and Experiments in Freedom. Briarpatch.
Nomad’s Case for Silence. Boxcar Poetry Review.
Nomad Legend: Midwife and Nomad Legend: Moon’s Benediction. Zocalo Poets.
IN PRINT
Sorry I Didn’t Call, I’ve Been Busy; As Though It Were a Small Child; and Prayer for the Things We Couldn’t Say. The Journal, 46.2
Unsent Text Messages to Desire in a Gas Mask. Pleiades, 40.2.
After the Funeral. Prism International, 58.2.
Everything Will Always Be Okay. American Poetry Review, 46.6.
The Year of the Shoe and Hell is Repetition. Pacific Review, Errant Mythologies Issue.
Interrogation in the Museum of Many Hungers and Syndrome. Hot Metal Bridge, 21.
Succession. Meridian, 38.
Winter Country. Painted Bride Quarterly, 93.
Lazarus Reconsiders His Awakening and Elegy for the Hellfire. Big Bell, 9.
Sixteen and Aubade. Bedfellows, 5.
The Men Who Turned into Air; Time Stops on Mount Batur; and Garden State. As Us Journal, 5.
After Coltrane and Tonight We Drink Whiskey and Dive. Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, 40th Anniversary Special Issue.
Promised Land: Sonnets for My Mother. Black Renaissance Noire, 14.2.
Siege and Balm for the Un-Body. Kalyani Magazine, 4.
How to Watch The Act of Killing and Self-Portrait as the Last Will of Lot’s Wife. Fifth Wednesday Journal.
Suppose You Were a Komodo Dragon. Apogee Journal, 3.
Roads to a Dance and Soothsayer. Generations Literary Journal, 3.
The Catheter Speaks. 580 Split: Journal of Arts and Letters, 12.
ESSAYS
Far From the Son. Oprah Daily.
My Mother's Pain.The Atlantic.
How Bruce Lee combined martial arts with the blaxploitation genre. The Undefeated.
How Zhang Weili’s UFC title win reclaims our common humanity. The Undefeated.
Cynthia Dewi Oka on Aracelis Girmay’s “Arroz Poetica.” Poetry Daily.
Becoming McFierce. ESPNW.
Forum: Poets and Borders, Part 2. Poetry International.
Homeplace as Revolutionary Front. Briarpatch.
Moving the Movement: A Multigenerational Ideal of Revolutionary Work. Leftturn: Notes from the Global Intifada.
anthologies
“Femme Borealis” by Cynthia Dewi Oka (2021).
The Offering. So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023).
Conditions of Peace. They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2023).
Driving to York Prison in a Thunderbird. What Saves Us: Poems of Outrage and Empathy in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press, 2019).
Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda. Soul Sister Revue: A Poetry Compilation (Jamii Publishing, 2019).
Blood & Spirit. Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press, 2018).
Elegy with a White Shirt. Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism (OR Books, 2018).
After Hurricane Sandy. Best of Kweli: An Aster(ix) Anthology (Blue Sketch Press, 2017).
Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis; A Conversation with My Six-Year-Old About Revolution and Population Studies. Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (PM Press, 2016).
Dear Poetry; Captive; Anthem; and Ishtar of Suburbia. Read Women: An Anthology (Locked Horn Press, 2014).
Poem for Prisoner #46664; Dock Scribes; Notes on Captain Ahab’s Workshop Before the Poet is Harpooned. Dismantle: An Anthology of Writing from VONA/Voices Writers’ Workshop (Thread Makes Blanket, 2014).