Quarantine Session #93: Cynthia Dewi Oka + Jenny Zhang

Summary

For Greenlight’s first poetry event of 2022, we welcomed Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka and acclaimed poet and fiction writer Jenny Zhang (Sour Heart) to share, discuss, and celebrate Oka’s third collection, Fire Is Not a Country. Oka’s poems track how the energies of migration, exploitation, patriarchal violation, and political repression shape and spar with familial love and obligation. Jenny read as well—sweet and cutting poems from her collection My Baby First Birthday—and together she and Oka waxed affectionately and probingly on the meanings of fire, “the little knives that we are made of,” and the connections between a country, the body, and “how okay we are supposed to be.” (Recorded January 11, 2022)