A Tinderbox in Three Acts - by Cynthia Dewi Oka (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Fire Is Not a Country (2021)

"At a moment in contemporary poetry when there is so much rousing energy for strength and calls to action, there is something exceptionally brilliant about this collection's attention to fatigue, to the body overwhelmed, to the idea that one should not have to be or perform super humanness in order to survive... Oka corroborates the unheard." -- Poetry Foundation

"The end of the world is not new to the characters who inhabit Oka's writing; their lives have already been shaped by intimate versions of it--violence, illness, heartbreak, financial precarity. Here social mobility is... a search for safety through a series of complex, unsparing negotiations with the self. What must we carry within ourselves to reach a safe place (will it become a burden?), and what must we leave behind (will it set us free?)? ...This is the place where Oka writes from--a place of urgency, of fire, of meteorites that crash on the face of the earth."-- Ploughshares

"Through every line, [Oka] sews the seams of memories with time through beautiful, evocative imagery... These blurred moments create dynamic recollections of familial love and obligation tied with intergenerational trauma and systemic violence. Oka challenges the perceptions of "us" versus "them" as she takes the audience on a journey about what it means to be seen or understood beyond the physical realm."-- International Examiner

"I cannot say enough how critical this work is for its history, specificity, and devotion. At its center churn insurmountable, incomprehensible brutalities. These are the facts. But Oka and her fellow organizers, researchers, artists, carriers of this history are also facts. With imagination and the sharpest tools, she cuts opening after opening into the page. This book is a fire. A ceremony. An unburying. It is a tremendous honor to walk behind Cynthia and this truly essential work."-- Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria

About the Author

Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing appears in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia in summer 2021. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). She is originally from Bali, Indonesia.