A tinderbox in three acts / Cynthia Dewi Oka ; foreword by Aracelis Girmay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Oka, Cynthia Dewi, author.

Contributor:

Girmay, Aracelis, writer of foreword.

Series:

American poets continuum series ; Number 195.

American poets continuum series ; Number 195

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (113 pages)

Place of Publication:

Rochester, New York : BOA Editions Ltd., [2022]

Summary:

"Selected by Aracelis Girmay, A Tinderbox in Three Acts is at once elegy and exegesis, fact and invention. In her fourth poetry collection, Cynthia Dewi Oka performs a lyric accounting of the anti-Communist genocide of 1965, which, led by the Indonesian military and with American assistance, erased and devastated millions of lives in Indonesia. Under the New Order dictatorship that ruled by terror for over three decades in the aftermath, perpetrators of the killings were celebrated as national heroes while survivors were systemically silenced. Drawing on US state documents that were only declassified in recent years, Oka gives form and voice to the ghosts that continue to haunt subsequent generations despite decades of state-produced amnesia and disinformation. In service of recovering what must not be remembered, A Tinderbox in Three Acts repurposes the sanitized lexicon of official discourse, imagines an emotional syntax for the unthinkable, and employs synesthetic modes of perception to convey that which exceeds language. Here, the boundary between singular and collective consciousness is blurred. Here, history as an artifact of the powerful is trumped by the halting memory of the people whom power sought to destroy. Where memory fails, here is poetry to honor the dishonored, the betrayed, the lost and still-awaited"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Intro

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Foreword

Apologia

Ghosts in order of their appearance

Act One

Rules of the Interrogation

Satria

Diplomacy

Window #083

Problems of the Renaissance

Telegram

Jaya

Math in the Post-Colony

Window #074

Like a Virgin, My Way: An Anti-Communist Anthem

Dewi

Flora and Fauna

Window #016

Fauna Is Flora

Window #033

Act Two

Nonik

Budi

Whereabouts

Window #024

Mao's "Combat Liberalism" Adapted for the New Order

Iman

Aspirations

Window #045

The Sound of Music

Hwi Siang

Fire

Window #027

The New Order

Memorandum

Act Three

March in the Garden of Ghosts

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Colophon

Back Cover.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-950774-72-4

OCLC:

1340959232