As She Appears

In “Vermeer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” from Shelley Wong’s debut collection As She Appears, the speaker is drawn to a masterpiece’s perfected beauty but is skeptical of heedless devotion, noting that the face of the woman in the painting “is a mirror that looks away from us.” Reflective, youthful, queer, the speaker understands how the raptures of beauty, especially the beauty of women, fashion, and the shores near San Francisco and New York City, can twist into “romantic sacrifice” and all the losses that entails. “I love / sequins but get // the sequence / confused,” she declares, with witty self-knowledge.

Wit abounds here, the wit of high spirits and pointed insight—“Don’t tell me what’s unbecoming / for a woman: I was raised on magazines”—and the more meditative wit that assuages the pain of falling out of love and finding one’s way through a newly estranged world, as in “Refrain”:

At our end, I broke 
from her

& every face grew 
stranger. Stranger,

speak to me 
like light

through a veil.

A typical Wong poem proceeds through disparate perceptions, as if removing translucent veils until some unifying radiance is uncovered. “I see / & tell myself / I am seeing,” she says, before setting aside self-consciousness for the “Startle, startle” of one gazing outward, “a hand / on my heart.” Clear-eyed about her otherness as a queer Asian American woman and about the ways in which love ironically illuminates the creative person’s need for solitude, Wong remains open to the possibility of bliss amid the world’s ongoing catastrophes. In “Courtship,” the poet exults so ecstatically that she sees herself transcending the medium (paper) on which her book is printed, reversing time and nature to embody love itself:

I can’t say why the world

    is so broken, caught
in a tunneling scream. Still, I aspire

    to be kissed by the sun. Exalt 
all women. I’m the tree coming back

through the page. […]