Nomad of Salt and Hard Water

Revelation lines Cynthia Dewi Oka’s poems as a girl comes into motherhood singing the waves between shadow and illumination; compass and map; Bali and Turtle Island. Stars and chili rinds, ocean and legend, altar and tent city, reverence-irreverence speaks through this debut collection with the sound of thunder and unflinching eye of a poet. nomad of salt and hard water celebrates journey; its relentless precision of language hums a threnody at once hymn and lifesong.

“Cynthia Oka’s book alternates between wailing lamentation and aphorism, mothersong and immigrant litany. Oka’s nomad suggests blessing and barter: ‘Trade your compass for mine.’ It’s true, the maps need new legends and luckily they can be redrawn entirely with this book of trickster verse. I love the variety of landscapes set down in these poems and the ways the poems themselves become varieties of landscape–tropics, desert, sea, city, the body itself–sometimes familiar, sometimes otherworldly, oftentimes fragmented. It’s exciting to read a debut collection that is so strange, so loving, so fierce.” -Patrick Rosal, author of Boneshepherds and My American Kundiman, winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award