Planetaria: Visual Poetry by Monica Ong, with a Foreword by John Yau

 

At the beginning of her marvelous book, Planetaria, Monica Ong declares her intention with an epigram taken from Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist, who was known as the ‘Queen of Nuclear Research’:

The main stumbling block in the way of any progress is and always has been unimpeachable tradition.

Instead of aligning her writing with an established, avant-garde agenda, Ong has defined a fresh trajectory that arises out of living in the diaspora while being aware that we inhabit an expanding universe. By incorporating family photographs, Chinese star charts, astrology texts, scientific diagrams, unwritten and neglected histories and biographies, and symbolic language, she is able to synthesize aspects of the microcosmic and macrocosmic into something original and disruptive.

Ong’s visual poems replete with charged language expose the obstacles shaping an individual’s life. Motivated by a propelling desire to dissolve the constraints of literary tradition, gender bias, family history, and cultural beliefs, she has intervened in classical Chinese texts and written shaped poems in praise of women scientists, always making something new (John Yau, “Foreword”)

I would say you absolutely have to get yourself a copy of Planetaria: Visual Poetry by Monica Ong, with a Foreword by John Yau (Trumbull CT: Proxima Vera, 2025), a stunningly-intricate blend of visuals and text as simultaneous poetry collection, experimental memoir, visual poetry assemblage and fine art catalogue. Planetaria is a book on family, constellations, loss and storytelling, wrapped in a visual array of wistful gestures and grounded expression. If you aren’t aware of Connecticut-based American poet and artist Monica Ong [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], she is also the author of the poetry debut Silent Anatomies (Tucson AZ: Kore Press, 2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry, with further work appearing in numerous journals including Scientific American, Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024), among other places. Planetaria is swirling with full-colour gloss, as Ong collages text on maps of constellations and an archive of family photographs that weave stellar cartographies and mythologies across a tapestry of storytelling, family story and song. Her gestures are heartfelt, visual and far-reaching, ever looking to the stars to hold what the ground allows. As she writes: “This interactive poem takes the form of a lunar volvelle. As the moon reveals its ever-changing shape, so too does the poem that radiates from the volvelle’s heart. Fear not. During the full moon, my father’s mother will watch over you.”

I find it interesting that Ong includes a back cover blurb by Los Angeles-based poet Victoria Chang, as the pieces here are reminiscent of the interplay between the collage-visuals and prose stretches of Chang’s own stunning non-fiction project, the deeply intimate Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here], a book that also writes of memory, history and mentors. Through both volumes, there is a particular collaboration between the visuals and the text, each one reacting to the other to create something that sits amid and surrounds them both, wrapped into a single, sustained image or narrative thread. The images that Ong collages and employs here are not there to accompany her text, but exist as one half of a larger structure along with those texts, offering different structures and purpose from piece to piece, from visual poems to what appear like large visual art displays to more subtle blends of image and words. While other contemporary visual poets might be attending smaller, even sequential, works that interplay visual and text, such as Canadian poets Kate Siklosi, Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin or Erín Moure, Ong’s Planetaria is an expansive, full-bodied book-held installation, a structure my dear spouse suggested was closer to the blend of collaged image and text of what British Columbia-based writer Nick Bantock began with his debut novel Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence (Raincoast Books, 1991), the larger narrative structure of the work including visual and physical elements, although Ong’s doesn’t share the design and narrative (convoluted) intensity of Bantock’s novels. And while this collection does include a startling array of visual poems, I wouldn’t call this a collection of visual poems per se, as Ong’s visual poems are but part of a much larger and complex multitude of text and image structures, with much of the collection built out of works that work to interplay and collage the elements of visual and text, but more in way of conversation or counterpoint than as a sequence of individual pieces where one form isn’t able to be removed without the whole structure collapsing (whereas this might be me simply splitting hairs, admittedly). This is absolutely beautiful, and narratively complex. As the poem “WOMEN’S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE” writes:

Odd number. Odd girl. One is an observation. The other, a polite indictment. She preferred to arrange her studio against the laws of symmetry, her way of saying up yours to Confucius and his man-pandering precepts. No matching pillows, tilted walls, her father’s books all perfect bound yet bent like a wormwood granny’s feet.

Imagine a woman’s calculations opening up the sky, the sun’s orbit but a mole on the lip of solar clustered nipple. How she spilled the milk from the glass of her astronomer eye knowing it would feed another hunger in another womb of time.

Mathematics were just foreplay. There is nothing wrong with being easy. Any man can scribble odes to flatter a goddess of the moon. She turned her garden into a laboratory to decipher the secret turning of the stars. Behind the ecliptic strung up crystal, she glimpsed her face in the lunar mirror’s  gleam.

Infinite planets. Her endless ether. There are those whose greatness grows in shadow, whose outer limits the spotting of blood cannot contain.