Shelley Wong is a poet whose work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. Her debut collection, As She Appears: Poems (YesYes Books), won the 2019 Pamet River Prize. It foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship marked by silence, a woman embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves, using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environments. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances, late-night Chinatown meals, conversations with Frida Kahlo, trees that “burst into glamour,” and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California and perfumed fashion runways to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive – exactly as they are.
May 2, 2025
Wong, Shelley
by
Shelley Wong is a poet whose work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. Her debut