Planetaria: Visual Poetry

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.

Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press). 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 anthologies like A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions).
Planetaria, Ong's recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and the Hunterdon Art Museum. 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.

John Yau is a poet, art critic, fiction writer, and publisher whose recent books include Disguise the Limit: John Yau's Collaborations, Tell It Slant, and Genghis Chan on Drums. He founded Black Square Editions and cofounded the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and Academy of American Poets, among others.

An art critic who has been publishing art criticism since 1978, Yau is also a professor of critical studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. After writing for Art in America and Artforum, he served as the arts editor of The Brooklyn Rail from 2006 to 2011, and then began writing for Hyperallergic Weekend. He was the recipient of the 2018 Jackson Poetry Prize. In 2021, Yau was awarded the Rabkin Prize for excellence in visual arts journalism. His books of art criticism include In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol and A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, as well as monographs on Wifredo Lam, Thomas Nozkowski, Joe Brainard, Catherine Murphy, A. R. Penck, Richard Artschwager, Pat Steir, Liu Xiaodong, and Kim Tschang-yeul.