Fire is not a country : poems / Cynthia Dewi Oka.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Oka, Cynthia Dewi, author.

Contributor:

Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families--Poetry.

Families.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

98 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Illinois : TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press, 2022.

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

"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. With a voice bound and wrestled apart by multiple histories, Fire Is Not a Country claims the spaces between here and there, then and now, us and not us. As she builds a lyric portrait of her own family, Oka interrogates how migration, economic exploitation, patriarchal violence, and a legacy of political repression shape the beauties and limitations of familial love and obligation. Woven throughout are speculative experiments that intervene in the popular apocalyptic narratives of our time with the wit of an unassimilable other. Oka's speakers mourn, labor, argue, digress, avenge, and fail, but they do not retreat. Born of conflicts public and private, this collection is for anyone interested in what it means to engage the multitudes within ourselves"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Meditation on the Worth of Anything

The Year of the Shoe

Protege

Part I

Discernment

Elegy with a White Shirt

Interlude

Ode on Her Last Day of Work / Lanny Liem

For My Father Who Once Rubbed Shoe Polish over His Bald Head

Syndrome

Part II

Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda

Because I Miss Her

Phantasm: A Body Politic

Pastoral in Which a Deer's Thirst Is the Tragic Hero

21 Lessons in the Art of Embouchure

Part III

Ode Where Milk Was Rare

Conditions of Peace

Dentures for Democracy

Driving to York Prison in a Thunderbird

The Roots Do a Live Cover of Mayfield's "Move On Up"

Part IV

Zuihitsu with Love for the Moon's Failed Rebellion

After the Funeral

Ancestral Agendas

You Don't Have to Be Tough All by Yourself, You Said

Recurring

Part V

In Europe, My Mother Wears Shades

Art of Revision.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

ISBN:

9780810144217

0810144212

OCLC:

1252736664

Publisher Number:

99989397268