Description: How do we transform the wreckage of our identities? Cynthia Dewi Oka's evocative collection answers this question by brimming with what we salvage from our most deep-seated battles. Reflecting the many dimensions of the poet's life, Salvage manifests an intermixture of aesthetic forms that encompasses multiple social, political and cultural contexts--leading readers to Bali, Indonesia, to the Pacific Northwest, and to South Jersey and Philadelphia. Throughout it insistently interrogates what it means to reach for our humanity through the guises of nation, race and gender.
Review Quotes: "The gods of poetry occasionally are lavish with their gifts, choosing to endow a writer with special access to their mysteries: Cynthia Dewi Oka is such a one, a migrant whose powerful poems embody and defy history's savage dislocations. From a world lost where 'houses/ shudder like goats at the stockyard' to the irony of 'a land where milk and honey can sweeten fear, ' her depth-charged vision is a seemingly inexhaustible source of eloquent, revelatory images." -Eleanor Wilner