Shelley Wong

“What is living if not the desire to see and be seen, as Shelley Wong expresses so tenderly in her debut collection that centers queer women of color—at Pride dances, late-night meals in Chinatown, and a summer on Fire Island. AS SHE APPEARS explores femininity, sexuality, and identity, and remains open to joy, lust, and self-love despite, or in contradiction to, the brokenness of the world.”

“‘As a girl, I never / saw a woman / who looked like me,’ Shelley Wong writes in this steadfast and assured debut, ‘I had to invent her.’ And it’s this very faith in self-manifestation that makes these poems accrue towards bold, prescient, and lasting architectures of being and feeling; they not only depict but think themselves into existence, which make them more than the sum of their parts, more than just an invention of ‘hers’ or ‘womanhood,’ but a quietly profound indictment of contemporary culture. And yet, what’s most indelible about Wong’s circumventing and vexed forays into the big questions, is her careful and tender rendering of our joys.”

“AS SHE APPEARS is visionary in more than one sense. It’s a riveting exploration of how one’s sense of self—not just as the perceived, but also as perceiver—is affected by the way one is represented, or not represented. Shelley Wong’s poems are heady, frank, kaleidoscopic, refractive, sensual, wondrous. They unsettle the distinctions we assume we can make between viewers—whether voyeur, consumer, spectator, or witness. I found myself wanting to linger in their pleasures and challenges. I started re-reading this collection as soon as I’d finished it.”

“It is the rare first book that arrives fully voiced, but in Shelley Wong’s AS SHE APPEARS, we enter these pages escorted by a steady hand at the small of the back, a mouth carefully placed just beneath our ear, the warmth of the body realized beside us in each fierce and tender poem of queer womanhood. These poems are haunted by the living, by the most vital impulses among us: to love, to be present, to declare the self. And in these declarations lies a femme heaven where we wander through poem after poem, each more lush and invigorating in their insistence. This is the book I’ve been waiting for all my life, and I have known for years that Wong would be the one to deliver it. I want to live inside its pages, take comfort as I wrap myself in its words. As Wong writes, ‘We are the new names, / the ones we’ve always known.’ When I read this book, I am every quiet queer girl with a desperate crush on the world.”

“In this tender debut, Shelley Wong contemplates the geographic, social, and bodily terrains of womanhood after the end of a relationship. Wong moves as seamlessly through the landscapes of a California marked by fire, an island populated with both non-native and invasive species, and the tidal waves of the ocean, to the interior spaces of a museum, the intimate vulnerabilities of a person discovering their mettle. This quietly daring collection reveals how to find oneself, how to be seen, invoking powerful women along the way. It is through these invocations, meditations, and encounters with both the brilliant worlds of flora and fauna, that the speaker can firmly say ’I choose myself’ and take the reins of her own agency. Never have I traveled on such a gentle but strengthened path.”

“Wong’s incandescent debut offers an understated but ebullient celebration of queer and Asian identity grounded in appreciation for art and the natural world. Sublime artistry. . .this vivid collection sizzles with remarkable nimbleness and energy.”

“Brilliant.”

“Wit abounds here, the wit of high spirits and pointed insight . . . and the more meditative wit that assuages the pain of falling out of love and finding one’s way through a newly estranged world.”

“Intimate and intricate. . .As She Appears is a wide-ranging collection full of defiance, mourning, invention, and celebration.”

“A bold and wondrous web of relationality into which we may enter as witness, lover, even sovereign.”

“The spirit of her collection is vast and vigorous.... What ties AS SHE APPEARS together is Wong’s eye for the environment and ear for music. Nature, in her hands, becomes inseparable from humanity and politics.”

“Shelley Wong is the poet-queen the world needs right now. Subversive and sensual. . .These gorgeous poems are alight with flowers, birds and longing, making a new world in their wake. AS SHE APPEARS is a stunning feat of self-creation.”

“Wong writes with a kaleidoscopic gaze. . .refusing to sidestep the subjects of racism and homophobia, these poems return to the self with affirmation.”

“Expansive beauty . . .meditating on flowers, Frida Kahlo, observation, and place, this collection teems with startling lines.”

“A gorgeous celebration of queer Asian identity.”

“As a queer Chinese-American poet, she palpates the stickiness of hybridity and personhood while queering the gaze, and playing with the lens to highlight how the self is seen— how being seen over-determines being, itself. Or her-self.”

“Expansion, revision, realization.”

“In Shelley Wong’s brilliant debut chapbook, girls look like trees and women make their own forests when the dangers of love rise. RARE BIRDS is a book of burning and beauty; the voices within these pages are multiple and multiply: they speak from the shadow of Frida Kahlo, the broken and exalted ‘I,’ the ‘we’ once named suspect— a tribe now rising. Mangoes, jets, heels, and salt—those objects of the heart—usher in a world both common and strange, a world where ‘the men carve me, but my bones / cut back.’ Prepared to be astonished, seduced, and transformed by the poems woven and sung here: ‘I peacock in the in-between,’ proclaims the speaker. ‘I multiply like a queen.’”