Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears, winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize, and the chapbook Rare Birds. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. More about this author >
From the publisher:
Shelley Wong’s debut, As She Appears, foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence, a woman crosses over and 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. With both praise and precision, Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environment. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances and 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, 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 in love, exactly as they are.
