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: "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
"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 "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. 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 "Reading Cynthia Dewi Oka is an EXPERIENCE. In Fire Is Not a Country, the devotional is alive and freed from those who have abused it. Reverence is as honorable as irreverence. Sorrow is subterranean and always fighting valiantly to come to the surface. Ghosts live vicariously through the living. The ancestors are calling and calling and calling. Sometimes images precede meaning and sometimes meaning creates images. 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. How to describe something that is best experienced in the bodies we are in? 'I have just begun to love / the little knives of which I'm made.' 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