Join us for an evening with Monica Ong, who will read from her new poetry collection, Planetaria. A conversation with Sumita Chakraborty will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Rewriting the sky from a female perspective, Ong invites readers into the intimate cosmology of Planetaria, utilizing the visual language of astronomy to explore the precarious territories of motherhood, women in science, and diaspora identity. This poetry collection examines the power struggles that myth-making elicits through the alchemy of text and image hybrids.
With a foreword by poet and art critic John Yau, these poems move through constellations, across ancestral skies, turning wide-eyed insomnia into nocturnes in search of home. This unique collection includes gallery views of the poems as installations, fine press, and interactive works, giving full expression to Ong’s interdisciplinary practice of visual poetry. If poetry and astronomy were to throw an art party, this one welcomes audiences across disciplines and cultures to imagine new cosmographies where everyone belongs.
About the Author: Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. You can find some of her work in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine. Ong’s astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book, Planetaria. Her fine press editions and literary art objects reside in over fifty institutional collections worldwide. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow.
About the Moderator: Sumita Chakraborty is a poet and scholar, and the author of the poetry collection Arrow (2020). She is currently writing a scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, which is under advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press, and a second collection of poetry titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record. She is the recipient of fellowships and honors from the Poetry Foundation, the UK’s Forward Arts Foundation, and Kundiman, among others, and an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia.
To order Planetaria, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"Planetaria by Monica Ong is a one-of-a-kind collection of visual poetry...Ong is boldly pushing forward into the night sky, and we’re pulled forward with her, into a cosmic incantation."
—Victoria Chang
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