Monica Ong

Planetaria is a series of visual poems by Monica Ong that leverage the language of astronomy to explore the precarious territories of motherhood, women in science, and diaspora identity. Playfully taking poetry off the page as light box assemblages and handheld volvelle poems, this series seeks to imagine the sky from a female perspective, examining the power struggles that myth-making elicits. Her “lost astronomy” prints made from diagrams remix scientific syntax as lyrical meditations on working motherhood and contemporary life. In her Insomnia Poems, audio collages are created in the style of sleep tapes about the things keeping us up at night. Letterpress & foil stamped Chinese constellation maps are designed into poems that depart from gendered hierarchies towards new mythologies of the night sky. If poetry and astronomy were to throw an art party, this one invites audiences across disciplines and cultures to imagine new cosmographies where everyone belongs.

"Star Gazer" is a planisphere poem based on the Chinese night sky, written and designed by Monica Ong, produced as a letterpress and gold foil literary object, 2021. Thumbnail - "The Way of Karma" was first published in Scientific American, November 2021. The poem is designed into a map of the Milky Way and archival image.

Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (2015), selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry. A Kundiman poetry fellow and graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong innovates on text+image to surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora, blurring the boundaries of art and literature. Planetaria, a new exhibition of astronomy-inspired visual poetry, debuted last summer at the Institute Library of New Haven and opens at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago during the spring of 2022. In 2021 Monica founded Proxima Vera, a micropress specializing in fine press poetry broadsides, literary objects, and digital editions. Her work has been acquired by institutional collections nationwide, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, as well as the special collections at Yale, Brown, Stanford, SUNY Buffalo, University of Iowa, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and UC Berkeley to name a few. You can find her work published most recently in Tab Journal, Scientific American, Poetry Magazine, Redivider, Breakwater Review, Waxwing Magazine and ctrl+v.