Scan barcode
kleonard's review
4.0
This is a rich and powerful collection of poetry, scripts, and prose poems chronicling the passages of life and time, and grappling with pain, displacement, and anger. The writing is lush, sometimes going a little too far beyond metaphor and threatening to lose the track altogether, but broadly readable and engaging. The author's various genres encourage readers to think about the meaning of form and genre, and how it shapes our reading.
ndrsmoon's review
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Cynthia Dewi Oka's third collection is my first glimpse to her body of work. Highlighted recently in Potery Foundation's VS podcast, the opening poem, Meditation on the Worth of Anything left a mark. It talks about migration, about our relationship with our parents (our mothers in particular), on how they took their stories and blend in their second homes, and maybe they really don't need to understand what Juliana Margulies says in The Good Wife.
The diaspora themes, namely families, intergenerational trauma, systemic violence that is translated on toxic masculinity, the chorus and dissonances of our different stories, and maybe just watching Sonequa Martin-Green acting on Star Trek, act as the thread that Cynthia Dewi Oka uses to bind this really powerful collection.
Particular highlights for me are these verses on Because I miss her
The diaspora themes, namely families, intergenerational trauma, systemic violence that is translated on toxic masculinity, the chorus and dissonances of our different stories, and maybe just watching Sonequa Martin-Green acting on Star Trek, act as the thread that Cynthia Dewi Oka uses to bind this really powerful collection.
Particular highlights for me are these verses on Because I miss her
She
would have wanted me to ask
nicely, to volunteer
my life for an idea of my life, because
she knows what it is to send
a voice out over the water and have
nothing come back.
The speculative elements of Interlude, Phantasm: A Body Politic, which packs so much in just so little space.
And of course, the extremely tactful, humorous and a testament of how our mothers absorbed their second language in Ode on Her Last Day of Work.
Thanks to NetGalley and the Northwestern University Press for providing me an eARC of this book.
lelliereads's review
5.0
Wow! Cynthia Dewi Oka is truly an incredible poet. It has been so long since I've found a collection of poetry that I found the writing to be so precise and beautiful. I don't even know how to describe what I just read. Even visually on the page, the poems are arranged in different formats, so as you flip through the book it looks dynamic and interesting. There are a few photographs throughout the book and even the descriptions of the photographs at the end are beautiful.
I'm in a book club that exclusively reads AAPI books, and I can't wait to share this book with that group! Thank you so much to netgalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
I'm in a book club that exclusively reads AAPI books, and I can't wait to share this book with that group! Thank you so much to netgalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
More...