As She Appears (YesYes Books, 2022)

In As She Appears, Shelley Wong explores identity—as a queer woman of color and post break-up—through imagery and language plucked from the world around her: the ocean, seasons, landscapes, specific colors, contemporary culture, artwork, fashion . . .

"On land I can still lose
my boundary, identifying

with the ocean & not the lake."

(from "The Ocean Will Take Us One Day")

"I wear pale pink to bloom—a pastel queen, soft sight."

(from "Pandemic Spring")

I don’t know if I have the eloquence or skill to give As She Appears the proper review it deserves, but it’s a stunning collection, and I read each poem two to three times, in awe of them all.

I especially enjoyed the two poems inspired by Frida Kahlo, and the way Wong explores her own identity through Kahlo’s identity, as both attached to and separate from her husband. How Kahlo (and perhaps the speaker) sometimes dipped into the shadow of his sun:

"I was once

caught in my own silence
that sharp circle. To call
my lover away from

her grief, her desperate
wandering: I undid
my departures. Lived

in a quiet interior, waking
with my light elsewhere,
scattered across the waves."
 
(from "Dear Frida")

How the speaker urges Kahlo to slice herself from him,

“Dip the brush in azul
for feathers so a bird
will fly above your bed

& you can wash away
the memory of his sweat . . .”

(from “Epithalamium”)

and see herself for the moon that she is:

”Always, you are twinned:
one side a mirror, the other

a window—you have already
changed the skies.”

(from “Epithalamium”)

It feels like Wong is speaking both to Kahlo and to herself, her own desire to be seen. Later, in “My Therapist Asks If I would Be Happier If I Were Straight,” Wong writes:

“As a girl, I never

saw a woman
who looked like me.

I had to invent her.
I’m inventing her.”

Again, this discovery of identity on multiple levels. As if she is turning the words she once directed toward Kahlo onto herself.

As She Appears begins in the middle of the speaker’s journey to self—a place where she is “still learning to hold // certain illuminations, like how quiet / is strong & often beautiful” (from “To Yellow”)—and ends in a soft bloom:

"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."

(from "Pandemic Spring")

In the end, and throughout the whole collection, Wong chooses herself, and she does so with a tenderness, vulnerability, and wonder for the world around her. I love the way Keetje Kuipers (author of All Its Charms) describes how it feels to read this book: “I am every quiet queer girl with a desperate crush on the world.”

I am most certainly not doing As She Appears justice here, but I do hope you’ll read this poetry collection and develop your own desperate crush on the world—and maybe even on yourself.

Learn more about Shelley Wong at shelley-wong.com .