Cynthia Dewi Oka’s Salvage Book Release
December First Friday
First Friday, December 1, 6 – 8:30 p.m.Join us this First Friday as we celebrate the release of acclaimed local poet Cynthia Dewi Oka’s newest poetry collection, Salvage. Copies will be available for sale and signing by the author.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
“We are in the thick of the sludge of salvage, in an age of greedy locusts who are making plans to own and suck down anything they perceive of value. Add vitriolic race hate verbiage, and visionaries are bound to emerge. Cynthia Dewi is one of these visionaries, a word prophet. She writes with one foot in time, the other in timelessness. These poems in her newest collection Salvage are small fires to light the way. They are lit by urgent need. With these poems, we will make it through.” –JOY HARJO“Salvage is a necessary collection of poems that steadily pushes us not only to witness our world and surroundings, but to engage with both the stunning and the brutal, to hold both the dirt and the beauty, to oscillate between the guttural and the want, and to look so deeply at love and how it can sometimes erupt and feel broken – how to keep honoring it.” –ELLEN HAGAN
“The gods of poetry occasionally are lavish with their gifts, choosing to endow a writer with special access to their mysteries: Cynthia Dewi Oka is such a one, a migrant whose powerful poems embody and defy history’s savage dislocations. From a world lost where ‘houses/ shudder like goats at the stockyard’ to the irony of ‘a land where milk and honey can sweeten fear,’ her depth-charged vision is a seemingly inexhaustible source of eloquent, revelatory images.” –ELEANOR WILNER
“I love the mythical depth, the civic outcry, the lyric inventiveness of these poems. But most of all, I love how how beautifully music is made patiently from the sorrow, how a human ‘holds his breath, secretly / chains to a single note all the mutinies inside him–‘. A powerful book.” –ILYA KAMINSKY
“Cynthia Dewi Oka’s work is full of ‘the kind of beauty that incinerates/the shelter of the body,’ bringing it (us) closer to the wall-less wilds where every thing is kin. She reminds us that ‘to salvage’ is to, with profound effort, transform loss into possibility. In this way, the poems are species of invention and surrender, ceremonies of memory and reckoning. Over and over I am surprised by a diction this lucid, this precise, this feral. No one else writes like this. –ARACELIS GIRMAY
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Cynthia Dewi Oka is a poet, immigrant, and the author of Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016) and Salvage (Northwestern University Press, 2017). A two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, she has received the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry and grants from VONA, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Leeway Foundation. She is the creator of Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop and has served as a poetry mentor for the The Blueshift Journal’s Speakeasy Project. Her poetry appears widely online and in print, including in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Guernica, Black Renaissance Noire, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a contributor to the anthologies Best of Kweli: An Aster(ix) Anthology, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines, Read Women, and Dismantle: a VONA Anthology. Originally from Bali, Indonesia, she’s now based in South Jersey and works as a community organizer with the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia. Visit her at http://cynthiadewioka.com/
Don’t forget to stop by earlier for the Look/Draw/Write Workshop Series with Artblog at 5 p.m.!
Source: Upcoming Events — December First Friday – Salvage Book Release — Asian Arts Initiative