A review by ndrsmoon
Fire Is Not a Country: Poems by Cynthia Dewi Oka

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

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.