Description: In her third collection, Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka dives into the implications of being parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism.
Review Quotes: "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, author of M Archive: After the End of the World
"In this fiercely brilliant book, Cynthia Dewi Oka cements her position as a poet who every single one of us should be reading and learning from. 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. There's so much to learn from Oka. So many ways to be in conversation with this book and, in turn, the world. Collaborative, theatrical, experimental, open-hearted. We need the poetry this book invites us into right now." --Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic