Cynthia Dewi Oka & Jenny Zhang

Photo of Cynthia Dewi Oka

Photo of Jenny ZhangVIRTUAL: Live via Zoom 
Tuesday, January 11, 7:30 PM ET 
Cynthia Dewi Oka presents Fire Is Not a Country: Poems
In conversation with Jenny Zhang

Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka joins Greenlight virtually to share her third collection of poems. Fire Is Not a Country renders a multivocal lyric portrait of Oka’s family that dives into the implications of being variously parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism. In a voice that wrestles with multiple histories and temporalities, Oka’s poems track how the energies of migration, exploitation, patriarchal violation, and political repression shape and spar with familial love and obligation. For Greenlight’s first poetry event of 2022, we are delighted to welcome Oka in conversation with acclaimed poet and fiction writer Jenny Zhang (Sour Heart) for a conversation on craft, legacy, and writing to honor the unassimilable.

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Cynthia Dewi Oka photo credit: Jose Quintana

Event date: 

Tuesday, January 11, 2022 - 7:30pm

Event address: 

NY
Fire Is Not a Country: Poems By Cynthia Dewi Oka Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780810144217
Availability: Available In Store Now (while supplies last)
Published: TriQuarterly - November 22nd, 2021

In her third collection, Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka dives into the implications of being parents, children, workers, and unwanted human beings under the savage reign of global capitalism and resurgent nativism. With a voice bound and wrestled apart by multiple histories, Fire Is Not a Country claims the spaces between here and there, then and now, us and not us.


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Sour Heart: Stories By Jenny Zhang Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780399589409
Availability: Available In Store Now (while supplies last)
Published: Lenny - May 1st, 2018

Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat—dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck—these seven stories showcase Zhang’s compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy’s Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.


My Baby First Birthday By Jenny Zhang Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9781947793811
Availability: Not In Store / Available To Order (allow for shipping time to bookstore or direct-to-home)
Published: Tin House Books - May 12th, 2020

Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. 


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