In anticipation of the Collingswood Book Festival, we thought it might be nice to have some of our senior editors and a couple of festival participants sit down for a proper chat about poetry and community, the anonymity of sending work out into the void and the anonymity of masks, and of course, bears […]
Cynthia Dewi Oka
Cynthia Dewi Oka
Cynthia Dewi Oka is a poet and author of Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). A Pushcart Prize Nominee and VONA alum, her work has or will soon appear in Guernica, Black Renaissance Noire, As/Us Journal, The Wide Shore, Kweli, Apogee, Obsidian, The Massachusetts Review, and other publications. She has received an […]
Cynthia Dewi Oka: Breach
While other girls were testing the firm peach of their bodies against Apollo’s golden shield, I was looking for ways to tear out of mine like a wetsuit. To swim away, bold and magenta fish far beyond the Pharaoh’s hook of my father’s pain, the hollow floor of the boat where he waited like a […]
Cynthia Dewi Oka: Pulses
begin the body’s wick the kidney-root of flame muscular palimpsest my father’s lips a memory of water hold vigil around the bed become garden float and bless life’s effort to lift the dark helmet : (a) he throbbed like a mountain range (b) cold is a field of tulips somewhere in northern Washington the sky […]
Cynthia Dewi Oka: Winter Country
November Black Sheep Reading
Last night, PBQ soldiered on and hosted its monthly reading at the Black Sheep Pub in Philadelphia with Anne-Adele Wight, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Lillian Dunn, and Brad Windhauser. First up, we had Lillian Dunn, program manager of SPACES and co-founder of Apiary Magazine who shared with us poetry on the small details of beauty around […]