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As She Appears
***LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD*** ***WINNER OF THE 2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD***
Winner of the Pamet River Prize, 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.
Winner of the Pamet River Prize, 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.
81 pages, Paperback
First published May 10, 2022
5 people are currently reading
657 people want to read
About the author
Shelley Wong
3 books12 followersSHELLEY WONG is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the Pamet River Prize, and the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2021, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
March 4, 2023
This was a lovely collection. I especially liked the poems to or from the perspective of Frida Kahlo, as well as ones that had images of west coast nature. I have a feeling I missed a number of references (to music, visual art). The ones I did get really accentuated the poem's meaning: for example there's one poem titled "All the Beyoncés and Lucy Lius" after the Outkast song and another that references Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera as the "elephant and the dove." For bi/queer women of colour representation in poetry this book is especially interesting.
September 8, 2022
What I love about these poems is the way the author create sentences that stretch my brain’s compartments. Items are described in abnormal yet still accurate ways. Nouns in place of additives. It’s beautiful and I get a slight joy of solving an odd puzzle every time it happens. Also fire island has an alluring curiosity…
March 12, 2023
overall, i don’t think i enjoyed this collection as much as i wanted to, but there some incredible stand out poems and lines in this. wonderful uses of alliteration!!
December 21, 2022
best birthday present ever
July 10, 2024
Refrain
My heart sleeps, while light lies in its envelope.
If I startle, I dig into my retreat. I mean:
I choose myself. Some can only love once.
How true will it be? I love sequins
but get the sequence confused. To once love,
I found my dearest friend, so now
every face grows stranger. Stranger, speak to me,
like light through a veil. Like a spent match,
she turns to look for me and I fade
at what’s unsaid. A sequoia has every vowel.
Every vow like a closed hand. When I’ve worn
my body down from dancing, I still point
to the sky. I will honor my body, my only.
My only body, its honor, my will.
My heart sleeps, while light lies in its envelope.
If I startle, I dig into my retreat. I mean:
I choose myself. Some can only love once.
How true will it be? I love sequins
but get the sequence confused. To once love,
I found my dearest friend, so now
every face grows stranger. Stranger, speak to me,
like light through a veil. Like a spent match,
she turns to look for me and I fade
at what’s unsaid. A sequoia has every vowel.
Every vow like a closed hand. When I’ve worn
my body down from dancing, I still point
to the sky. I will honor my body, my only.
My only body, its honor, my will.
Read
January 8, 2023- the poems seem either too neat or too abstract
- for me, this collection really got the sapphic relationship vibe in the bay area,,,,it was funny but also jarring and also good
- i also really like how so many of these poems feel like lil stories: retellings and snapshots
- fav poems: courtship, my therapist asks if i would be happier if i were straight, pandemic spring, private collection, refrain
excited to read this poet's future work!
- for me, this collection really got the sapphic relationship vibe in the bay area,,,,it was funny but also jarring and also good
- i also really like how so many of these poems feel like lil stories: retellings and snapshots
- fav poems: courtship, my therapist asks if i would be happier if i were straight, pandemic spring, private collection, refrain
excited to read this poet's future work!
March 28, 2022
I loved so many things about this book of poems--the way the book proudly gives space and language to queer Asian identity and queer love; the unashamed way the poet owns the language of flowers, fashion and culture; the belief in the quiet power of allowing oneself to love oneself.
August 16, 2024
stand out is pursuit
Read
January 16, 2025I love an accidental buy of a poetry collection with midwestern connections.
May 4, 2022
I've been a fan of Shelley Wong's poetry for some time, and eagerly awaited this collection. As She Appears does not disappoint! The poems are an incredibly rich, layered, and resonant exploration of self-determination... such powerful and beautiful work. Wong's poems draw the reader back, again and again, to conteplate both the beauty of her turns of phrase and the questions she asks of herself-- and us.
July 5, 2024
“Yes, it was beginning in each
Yes, it threw waves across our lives
Yes, we were looking at each other”
-Muriel Rukeyser
Shelley Wong’s original writing in the poetry book As She Appears in and of itself could be discussed for much longer than this paper will allow. Yet, her writing asks the reader to question the idea of originality in writing in the first place— and instead consider the ways our writing has been foreseen and supported by ancestors, by ghosts, by friends and lovers, and by community in general. Therefore, I start with Muriel Rukeyser’s quote, which is the epigraph to As She Appears.
“As a girl, I never/ saw a woman/ who looked like me/ I had to invent her,” Wong later writes in “My Therapist Asks If I Would Be Happier If I Was Straight” (58). These two quotes, side by side, tell a story of As She Appears, and, in part, the kind of questions those of multiple identities (ergo: all of us) are trying to answer: How does one find a kind of self-discovery and self-love, while still honoring community? The poetry book, published by the small press Yes Yes Books, is thin, but powerful, and was well received, longlisted for the 2022 National Book award. Wong is a San Francisco-based queer Chinese American poet, which comes through in every single poem of the book. From Fire-Island and Los Angeles make themselves known as locations, to Tegan & Sara in San Francisco or Oakland, a meditation on the color “Yellow,” the ever-present water of the bay, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Golden Gate Park “two women glancing at each other, and no one says sanctuary or belonging” (37). Wong weaves these locations and temporal markers through, so that the reader knows exactly what this poetry book is about: a west coast Asian queer. She is doing a sort of necromancy with her poetry: turning the specters of a past, or ghosts that never even were as a product of a society that would not let them be, into poems of boldness and precision, of true architecture that do not just try to transcend the idea of “womanhood” or “gayness,” but act as a radical response to it in the practical and material sense. She builds a strong foundation, through rendering of her joys and her sorrows, of what it could mean to appear as more than just the sum of your “minoritarian” parts, but as a whole indictment of contemporary culture. A queer, Asian, woman, honoring “my body, my only. / My only body, / it’s honor, my will” (30).
“For the Living in the New World” begins with a refrain: “There are so many ways to explore a forest— / over clover clusters, past skunk cabbages/ to a field where we listen for a ghost/ of a song. The hypergreen periphery/ is the opposite of Los Angeles on fire.” Wong is creating sentences that, through line breaks, stretch the brain’s compartment, the nouns abnormal in satisfying ways. She begins with the tenderness of nature, specifically the natural location of queer womanhood, and the wandering that queer womanhood incites within her. It tells the reader that she will be working on how to find oneself, how to be seen, invoking powerful women along the way in this book. She brings forth the image of the Los Angeles fire to provide modernity, and to provide an acknowledgement of climate change and the ailments that she and her community are working through. Then, she writes, “Any tree can become a ladder. These trees/ have too many branches, but it is not my place/ to revise them.” She invokes the image of trees incessantly throughout the book. Later, in “Watch Hill,” she says “curved trees” lean at various angles around her and her friends, “which I privately name/ the queer trees for their arcs & intertwining,” and in “The Fall Forecast,” she ends the poem by saying “The girls look like night trees.” Using “For the Living in the New World,” as a guide, Wong is reveling in the uniqueness of the natural world, as well as the queer women who surround them. She is interested in the unnatural throughout the natural, and the crookedness of the trees as visual projections of queer unnaturalness. Later, she invokes the brilliance of many people, exalting some of them for their queer visionary energy (Frank O’Hara, Tegan & Sara), some for their ability to place their Asianness in the spotlight (Lucy Liu, Maggie Cheung, Michelle Kwan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), some for their “quiet interior” that inspires her own (Frida Kahlo), and some for just being friends interest her and teach her (Ranger Kelsey, Drew). In naming some women, she exalts them, warmly, and tenderly with gratitude. It’s how she can make the reader wish they could wrap themselves in the darkness of the “trees.” Similarly, the lack of naming in these indistinguishable “trees” and “fields,” that come to represent the community she naturally gravitates towards and winds around, is also somehow tender. She precisely decides who will be named and who will go unnamed, yet there is no hierarchy in the dichotomy of a named woman and an unnamed woman, and thus, when she says “Exalt/ all women”(8) in “Courtship,” the reader knows she means it.
It’s important to recognize that this does not mean Wong is trying to make the differences between women indistinguishable. In fact, her Chinese identity is essential in this collection. We see this in poems like “To Yellow,” where Wong is contemplating the afterlife of American involvement in Asian politics: “Your orb over the Pacific casts a glittering runway” (7). Though she might be addressing this color “yellow,” she is also addressing the creation of racial hierarchy that American imperialism was at the heart of— the designation of yellow as particularly Asian in a negative connotation. She writes “To call/my lover away from her grief, her desperate/ wandering: I undid/ my departures”(12). Here and elsewhere, she ruminates on ghostliness as a particularly queer experience— the “wandering” of queer grief speaking to the loss that is inherent to the identity, much like how José Esteban Muñoz wrote, “We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost,” in Cruising Utopia. The ephemeral ghost finds itself in every one of Wong’s poems, whether in the direct naming of a ghost, or in the soft winding through oceans and trees, or stating that “the answer for where/we are meant to wander won’t be/ unveiled praying to paint” (46). It is in this wandering that Wong forces the reader not only to ask where they will wander, but also if the answer to such a question is possible or queer in and of itself.
Yes, it threw waves across our lives
Yes, we were looking at each other”
-Muriel Rukeyser
Shelley Wong’s original writing in the poetry book As She Appears in and of itself could be discussed for much longer than this paper will allow. Yet, her writing asks the reader to question the idea of originality in writing in the first place— and instead consider the ways our writing has been foreseen and supported by ancestors, by ghosts, by friends and lovers, and by community in general. Therefore, I start with Muriel Rukeyser’s quote, which is the epigraph to As She Appears.
“As a girl, I never/ saw a woman/ who looked like me/ I had to invent her,” Wong later writes in “My Therapist Asks If I Would Be Happier If I Was Straight” (58). These two quotes, side by side, tell a story of As She Appears, and, in part, the kind of questions those of multiple identities (ergo: all of us) are trying to answer: How does one find a kind of self-discovery and self-love, while still honoring community? The poetry book, published by the small press Yes Yes Books, is thin, but powerful, and was well received, longlisted for the 2022 National Book award. Wong is a San Francisco-based queer Chinese American poet, which comes through in every single poem of the book. From Fire-Island and Los Angeles make themselves known as locations, to Tegan & Sara in San Francisco or Oakland, a meditation on the color “Yellow,” the ever-present water of the bay, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Golden Gate Park “two women glancing at each other, and no one says sanctuary or belonging” (37). Wong weaves these locations and temporal markers through, so that the reader knows exactly what this poetry book is about: a west coast Asian queer. She is doing a sort of necromancy with her poetry: turning the specters of a past, or ghosts that never even were as a product of a society that would not let them be, into poems of boldness and precision, of true architecture that do not just try to transcend the idea of “womanhood” or “gayness,” but act as a radical response to it in the practical and material sense. She builds a strong foundation, through rendering of her joys and her sorrows, of what it could mean to appear as more than just the sum of your “minoritarian” parts, but as a whole indictment of contemporary culture. A queer, Asian, woman, honoring “my body, my only. / My only body, / it’s honor, my will” (30).
“For the Living in the New World” begins with a refrain: “There are so many ways to explore a forest— / over clover clusters, past skunk cabbages/ to a field where we listen for a ghost/ of a song. The hypergreen periphery/ is the opposite of Los Angeles on fire.” Wong is creating sentences that, through line breaks, stretch the brain’s compartment, the nouns abnormal in satisfying ways. She begins with the tenderness of nature, specifically the natural location of queer womanhood, and the wandering that queer womanhood incites within her. It tells the reader that she will be working on how to find oneself, how to be seen, invoking powerful women along the way in this book. She brings forth the image of the Los Angeles fire to provide modernity, and to provide an acknowledgement of climate change and the ailments that she and her community are working through. Then, she writes, “Any tree can become a ladder. These trees/ have too many branches, but it is not my place/ to revise them.” She invokes the image of trees incessantly throughout the book. Later, in “Watch Hill,” she says “curved trees” lean at various angles around her and her friends, “which I privately name/ the queer trees for their arcs & intertwining,” and in “The Fall Forecast,” she ends the poem by saying “The girls look like night trees.” Using “For the Living in the New World,” as a guide, Wong is reveling in the uniqueness of the natural world, as well as the queer women who surround them. She is interested in the unnatural throughout the natural, and the crookedness of the trees as visual projections of queer unnaturalness. Later, she invokes the brilliance of many people, exalting some of them for their queer visionary energy (Frank O’Hara, Tegan & Sara), some for their ability to place their Asianness in the spotlight (Lucy Liu, Maggie Cheung, Michelle Kwan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), some for their “quiet interior” that inspires her own (Frida Kahlo), and some for just being friends interest her and teach her (Ranger Kelsey, Drew). In naming some women, she exalts them, warmly, and tenderly with gratitude. It’s how she can make the reader wish they could wrap themselves in the darkness of the “trees.” Similarly, the lack of naming in these indistinguishable “trees” and “fields,” that come to represent the community she naturally gravitates towards and winds around, is also somehow tender. She precisely decides who will be named and who will go unnamed, yet there is no hierarchy in the dichotomy of a named woman and an unnamed woman, and thus, when she says “Exalt/ all women”(8) in “Courtship,” the reader knows she means it.
It’s important to recognize that this does not mean Wong is trying to make the differences between women indistinguishable. In fact, her Chinese identity is essential in this collection. We see this in poems like “To Yellow,” where Wong is contemplating the afterlife of American involvement in Asian politics: “Your orb over the Pacific casts a glittering runway” (7). Though she might be addressing this color “yellow,” she is also addressing the creation of racial hierarchy that American imperialism was at the heart of— the designation of yellow as particularly Asian in a negative connotation. She writes “To call/my lover away from her grief, her desperate/ wandering: I undid/ my departures”(12). Here and elsewhere, she ruminates on ghostliness as a particularly queer experience— the “wandering” of queer grief speaking to the loss that is inherent to the identity, much like how José Esteban Muñoz wrote, “We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost,” in Cruising Utopia. The ephemeral ghost finds itself in every one of Wong’s poems, whether in the direct naming of a ghost, or in the soft winding through oceans and trees, or stating that “the answer for where/we are meant to wander won’t be/ unveiled praying to paint” (46). It is in this wandering that Wong forces the reader not only to ask where they will wander, but also if the answer to such a question is possible or queer in and of itself.
April 13, 2022
Shelley Wong is my new favourite poet :’)
“For the Living in the New World” is STUNNING
Also loved “All the Beyoncés and Lucy Lius,” “Night Ride,” “Pandemic Spring”
“For the Living in the New World” is STUNNING
Also loved “All the Beyoncés and Lucy Lius,” “Night Ride,” “Pandemic Spring”
August 30, 2025
Since finishing this book, I’ve been contemplating the expansive beauty of Wong’s debut collection dedicated to “…the quiet sisters.” The opening poem, “For the Living in the New World,” ends — and lives on in my brain: “Spring insists we can build the world // around us again. How has love brought you / here? My head is heavy from the crown.” Meditating on flowers, Frida Kahlo, observation, and place, this teems with startling lines. From “Invitation with Three Colors,” two I keep thinking of: “I forget— / & don’t dream.”
from “10 of the Best Poetry Collections of 2022” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/best-poetry-coll...
from “10 of the Best Poetry Collections of 2022” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/best-poetry-coll...
November 6, 2025
There is a focus of self in Shelley Wong’s As She Appears. Like a self can be constructed in sentimental ways. A sensuality to independence. It’s common to note how pleasurable it is to learn who you are to yourself. Like that negotiation between lonely and alone. And what I admire in Wong’s book is how she frames aloneness. There’s that invigorating morning walk in “Weather Advisory” that could be a walk home after spending the night with someone, or it could be that especially delicious solitude that comes with a morning walk when you’re going no where in particular. In this case, the poet is on Fire Island, with disheveled hair, a fog somewhere in the distance.
It’s one of many poems that benefits from a centering perspective. Which might sound like too psychological a take on the reading. I’m not meaning to speak to what I think might be happening in the poet’s life. More how the poem situates itself within its occasion. Yes, the book seems to chronicle the poet’s separation from a long term partner. And, yes, it’s that part of the breakup where she’s distanced herself from the actual breakup. So that, separate and alone, she can recognize the more tender parts of her life. This self that proposes itself in the opening section of As she appears feels like fertile ground for the new self that will emerge. The poems seem to absorb the landscape or situation around them. In “Watch Hill,” Wong describes the service berry tree, whose blooming signals the ground thawing after winter. An apt image for this moment in the breakup. So much is possible and unknown. But also the poet is learning there is a lot for her to know about herself
In essence, the poems fashion the self as a delicate formation. Someone who’s in process, in transition to a new outlook on life, with a new self to do that looking. I guess I would say many poems feel like a declaration of independence, but with a softer emphasis on the “declaration” part, and a subtle assertiveness on the “independence.” In some of my favorite poems, the poem constructs itself from a sequence of very independent clauses. A method she uses in the book’s opening poem, “For the Living in the New World,” and a later poem, “Invitation with Dirty Hands.” The poem is like an expressive bloom, with each sentence like an individual petal complementing the petals around it.
It’s one of many poems that benefits from a centering perspective. Which might sound like too psychological a take on the reading. I’m not meaning to speak to what I think might be happening in the poet’s life. More how the poem situates itself within its occasion. Yes, the book seems to chronicle the poet’s separation from a long term partner. And, yes, it’s that part of the breakup where she’s distanced herself from the actual breakup. So that, separate and alone, she can recognize the more tender parts of her life. This self that proposes itself in the opening section of As she appears feels like fertile ground for the new self that will emerge. The poems seem to absorb the landscape or situation around them. In “Watch Hill,” Wong describes the service berry tree, whose blooming signals the ground thawing after winter. An apt image for this moment in the breakup. So much is possible and unknown. But also the poet is learning there is a lot for her to know about herself
In essence, the poems fashion the self as a delicate formation. Someone who’s in process, in transition to a new outlook on life, with a new self to do that looking. I guess I would say many poems feel like a declaration of independence, but with a softer emphasis on the “declaration” part, and a subtle assertiveness on the “independence.” In some of my favorite poems, the poem constructs itself from a sequence of very independent clauses. A method she uses in the book’s opening poem, “For the Living in the New World,” and a later poem, “Invitation with Dirty Hands.” The poem is like an expressive bloom, with each sentence like an individual petal complementing the petals around it.
February 24, 2023
4 stars
I've not been having very good luck with poetry collections lately, but Shelley Wong's style was much closer up my alley. There were quite a few standout poems and only one that I truly disliked (my kingdom for a moratorium on poems about Alice in Wonderland!).
I really liked the "Forecast" poems for each season, which had many allusions to fashion and how seasonal trends correspond to the colors of nature in each season. Good stuff! "To Yellow" works in a similar vein but also ties in Wong's ethnic identity.
The Frida Kahlo poems were not as successful for me. I could also take or leave the majority of the Fire Island poems, which the exception of "Memorial Day Weekend."
"Pursuit" was a very relatable poem about, well, pursuing someone you know better than to pursue. And for the opposite vibe, "Refrain" is a perfect break-up poem. "Private Collection" completes the trio with a lovely ode to the quiet moments of companionship in a relationship.
"Winter Pineapple with Sea" is a good example of how Wong can connect seemingly disparate elements. I especially loved these lines:
"Interlude" is probably my favorite of the more nature-centric poems, a moving slice of life.
"The Ocean Will Take Us One Day" is one of the rare political moments in the collection, but effective.
Checked this one out from the library but will definitely need to purchase a copy soon for revisiting.
I've not been having very good luck with poetry collections lately, but Shelley Wong's style was much closer up my alley. There were quite a few standout poems and only one that I truly disliked (my kingdom for a moratorium on poems about Alice in Wonderland!).
I really liked the "Forecast" poems for each season, which had many allusions to fashion and how seasonal trends correspond to the colors of nature in each season. Good stuff! "To Yellow" works in a similar vein but also ties in Wong's ethnic identity.
The Frida Kahlo poems were not as successful for me. I could also take or leave the majority of the Fire Island poems, which the exception of "Memorial Day Weekend."
"Pursuit" was a very relatable poem about, well, pursuing someone you know better than to pursue. And for the opposite vibe, "Refrain" is a perfect break-up poem. "Private Collection" completes the trio with a lovely ode to the quiet moments of companionship in a relationship.
"Winter Pineapple with Sea" is a good example of how Wong can connect seemingly disparate elements. I especially loved these lines:
What's in my chest
is not a fist, nor a peony
but something
knotted & harder
to pull awake.
"Interlude" is probably my favorite of the more nature-centric poems, a moving slice of life.
"The Ocean Will Take Us One Day" is one of the rare political moments in the collection, but effective.
Checked this one out from the library but will definitely need to purchase a copy soon for revisiting.
October 16, 2022
I carried this collection around with me for a couple of weeks but I was never quite able to fall under its spell. I assume I am not the intended or desired audience but I was disappointed in myself for not finding a way in.
.
I didn’t love any of the nature-y poems and I particularly did not like the Fire Island poems. (Gee, Fire Island seems to be buzzing through the zeitgeist right now, doesn’t it? Maybe Fire Island changed in the years since I left NYC, but every time I was there it was just lots of people being drunk and stupid and honestly 1) not that much fun and 2) not gorgeous enough beaches to make up for the shorty evenings.)
.
That said, there were still poems that really smacked me into submission with their images and language.
.
Here are the poems that stood out to me:
Private Collection
To Yellow
All Beyonces and Lucy Lius
Pride Month
Pursuit
Softer, Softest.
.
And also this last poem (swipe).
.
And omfg that last line:
“To live, I want to be known & loved, the two together, inseparable.”
.
/swoon/ Oh yes indeed.
.
I didn’t love any of the nature-y poems and I particularly did not like the Fire Island poems. (Gee, Fire Island seems to be buzzing through the zeitgeist right now, doesn’t it? Maybe Fire Island changed in the years since I left NYC, but every time I was there it was just lots of people being drunk and stupid and honestly 1) not that much fun and 2) not gorgeous enough beaches to make up for the shorty evenings.)
.
That said, there were still poems that really smacked me into submission with their images and language.
.
Here are the poems that stood out to me:
Private Collection
To Yellow
All Beyonces and Lucy Lius
Pride Month
Pursuit
Softer, Softest.
.
And also this last poem (swipe).
.
And omfg that last line:
“To live, I want to be known & loved, the two together, inseparable.”
.
/swoon/ Oh yes indeed.
January 25, 2023
A short, delightful book of poems. Her phrasing is immaculate.
"I may be happiest improvising the language a body can make on the dance floor." (p. 3)
"Freely, she spoke, being proudly out, while I feared cruelty & broke my meaning." (p. 13)
"They lie back against each other like pages..." (p.14)
"On land I can still lose my boundary, identifying with the ocean and not the lake." (p. 41)
"How does a rhyme determine fate: daughter // laughter // slaughter." (p. 50)
"I can't say why the world is so broken, caught in a tunneling scream. Still, I aspire to be kissed by the sun." (p. 57)
"As a girl, I never saw a woman who looked like me. I had to invent her. I'm inventing her." (p. 58-59)
"I may be happiest improvising the language a body can make on the dance floor." (p. 3)
"Freely, she spoke, being proudly out, while I feared cruelty & broke my meaning." (p. 13)
"They lie back against each other like pages..." (p.14)
"On land I can still lose my boundary, identifying with the ocean and not the lake." (p. 41)
"How does a rhyme determine fate: daughter // laughter // slaughter." (p. 50)
"I can't say why the world is so broken, caught in a tunneling scream. Still, I aspire to be kissed by the sun." (p. 57)
"As a girl, I never saw a woman who looked like me. I had to invent her. I'm inventing her." (p. 58-59)
July 7, 2024
A collection of poems about identity, queerness, family, fitting in and love.
from Pride Month: "It was June and I was / awake past midnight gathering news about the Pulse / nightclub shooting. I fell asleep knowing I would wake / to walk against grief in waves."
from Albino: "The white peacock is in love / & that is all that I see. Dear / Spanish fan, immaculate flutter. / His feathers undulate & ask to be touched. Soft prince, / how your careful blankness / staggers. / The world defines itself / by your plumed horizon."
from Courtship: "I try on crowns // because I walk the walk. With age / we learn the lines of our bodies. // Don't tell me what's unbecoming / for a woman: I was raised on magazines."
from Pride Month: "It was June and I was / awake past midnight gathering news about the Pulse / nightclub shooting. I fell asleep knowing I would wake / to walk against grief in waves."
from Albino: "The white peacock is in love / & that is all that I see. Dear / Spanish fan, immaculate flutter. / His feathers undulate & ask to be touched. Soft prince, / how your careful blankness / staggers. / The world defines itself / by your plumed horizon."
from Courtship: "I try on crowns // because I walk the walk. With age / we learn the lines of our bodies. // Don't tell me what's unbecoming / for a woman: I was raised on magazines."
Read
April 3, 2025"In the end, I will say
that I, too, worshipped beauty,
parading in my pastels
I fought & loved the silences."
- 'Albino', pg.49
"for the encore, the cashmered girls sleep with velvet eyes
a finger to their lips: no trespassing on the runway
women in black embroider orchids in the orchestra pit"
- 'The Winter Forecast', pg. 50
"With age we learn the lines of our body."
- 'Courtship', pg. 56
"There is a gentleness that returns once you let go of love's disappointment."
"To live, I want to be known & loved, the two together, inseparable."
- 'Pandemic Spring', pg. 73
that I, too, worshipped beauty,
parading in my pastels
I fought & loved the silences."
- 'Albino', pg.49
"for the encore, the cashmered girls sleep with velvet eyes
a finger to their lips: no trespassing on the runway
women in black embroider orchids in the orchestra pit"
- 'The Winter Forecast', pg. 50
"With age we learn the lines of our body."
- 'Courtship', pg. 56
"There is a gentleness that returns once you let go of love's disappointment."
"To live, I want to be known & loved, the two together, inseparable."
- 'Pandemic Spring', pg. 73
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 6, 2022
AS SHE APPEARS offers a breathless tapestry—unashamed love, a commandment of language, a curation of culture and nature—delicately and deliberately woven into a blanket of poems that both comfort and offer permission. Shelley Wong masterfully turns us, line after line, into texture and surprise, drawing us deeper into a quiet space of one extraordinary question: What happens when we are truly able to love ourselves?
October 3, 2022
Shelley Wong's collection is quietly dazzling. It moves through examination of desire and identity with dexterity and evocative imagery. These poems examine the gaze, the way a woman is looked at and assessed, but also the way she looks at the world. There's grief and the recovery of grief. A softness and a strength. A book to return to, a book of great beauty.
June 20, 2023
Aptly titled, this debut collection features multiple attempts at self-invention as reconstructed through the lenses of society’s surveillance equipment; the mutable gaze of her lovers’ eyes; the aperture of her equivocal mind; and the all-seeing I of her murmuring heart.
“As a girl, I never
saw a woman
who looked like me
I had to invent her.
I am inventing her.”
—from “My Therapist Asks If I Would Be Happier If I Were Straight”
Favorite Poems:
“Private Collection”
“Refrain”
“Memorial Day Weekend”
“Watch Hill”
“Interlude”
“Albino”
“Pursuit”
“As a girl, I never
saw a woman
who looked like me
I had to invent her.
I am inventing her.”
—from “My Therapist Asks If I Would Be Happier If I Were Straight”
Favorite Poems:
“Private Collection”
“Refrain”
“Memorial Day Weekend”
“Watch Hill”
“Interlude”
“Albino”
“Pursuit”
April 30, 2023
3.5 stars
I wanted to like this more than I did, but it wasn't bad. There was a lot to like in the poems individually rather than as a collection
I think I missed a lot of references not being familiar with most of the places she writes about - which can't have helped.
I wanted to like this more than I did, but it wasn't bad. There was a lot to like in the poems individually rather than as a collection
I think I missed a lot of references not being familiar with most of the places she writes about - which can't have helped.
May 28, 2022
This BOOK. Shelley Wong brings so much joy into the world: To create, invent, see. Shelley sees the world with so much texture and delicacy, with awareness. I love her poems. I love this book.
June 25, 2022
I read this cover to cover in a forest grove and I highly recommend you do the same. These poems are absolutely riveting. A stunning collection.
Read
October 23, 2022damn I don't get poetry
November 4, 2022
I feel like I will read this collection a few more times in the future and unearth things I didn’t see at first read.
February 13, 2023
i armor myself / against a world that makes me itch.
July 13, 2023
"any tree can become a ladder. These trees have / too many branches, but it is not my place / to revise them."
Read
November 30, 2023“the last time / a mouth ignited her like spring”
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