How do we transform
the wreckage of our identities? Cynthia Dewi Oka’s evocative
collection answers this question by brimming with what we salvage
from our most deep-seated battles. Reflecting the many dimensions of
the poet’s life, Salvage manifests an intermixture of aesthetic
forms that encompasses multiple social, political, and cultural
contexts—leading readers to Bali, Indonesia, to the Pacific
Northwest, and to South Jersey and Philadelphia.
Throughout it
insistently interrogates what it means to reach for our humanity
through the guises of nation, race, and gender. Oka’s language
transports us through the many bodies of fluid poetics that inhabit
our migrating senses and permeate across generations into a personal
diaspora. Salvage invites us to be without borders.
