Book Talk with Monica Ong: Planetaria

We are delighted to celebrate the publication of Planetaria, a striking visual poetry collection and playfully intimate exploration of the night sky by Monica Ong, who will be in dialogue with local poet, Joan Kwon Glass.

More about the collection:

Rewriting the sky from a female perspective, Monica 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 collection examines the power struggles that myth-making elicits through the alchemy of text and image hybrids.

With a foreword by art critic and poet John Yau, these poems move through constellations, across ancestral skies, turning wide-eyed insomnia into nocturnes in search of home. This full color 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.

More about Monica:

Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024).

Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over fifty distinguished institutional collections worldwide. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow.

More about Joan:

Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean diasporic author of DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS (winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize) & NIGHT SWIM (winner of the 2022 Diode Editions Book Award), as well as the chapbooks HOW TO MAKE PANCAKES FOR A DEAD BOY (Harbor Editions, 2022) & IF RUST CAN GROW ON THE MOON (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). Her books & poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, The Slowdown & Rattlecast. Joan has been a finalist for the Poetry Northwest Possession Sound Series, the Tupelo Helena Whitehill Award, the University of Akron Poetry Prize & the Subnivean Award & her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, Terrain, Ninth Letter, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, AAWW (The Margins), RHINO, Rattle & elsewhere. Joan teaches for writing centers across the country, including Brooklyn Poets, Writing Workshops, Hudson Valley Writers Workshop & Corporeal & will be a 2025 guest speaker, guest writer or writer-in-residence at SWIMM, Amherst College, Smith College, Wesleyan University, & Western Connecticut State University’s MFA program. She is available for manuscript consultations, residencies, readings, speaking engagements & workshops.