As She Appears

<p><strong>Longlist 2023 National Book Award in Poetry</strong></p><p><strong>Winner 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry</strong></p><p><strong>Finalist 2023 Northern California Book Award Poetry</strong></p><p><strong>Longlist 2022 Julie Suk Award</strong></p><p><strong>Winner 2019 YesYes Books Pamet River Prize</strong></p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Shelley Wong's debut </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>As She Appears</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> (longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award and winner of a 2023 Lambda Literary Award) foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. With both praise and precision Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environment. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances and late-night Chinatown meals conversations with Frida Kahlo trees that burst into glamour and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California perfumed fashion runways to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love exactly as they are.</span></p>