As She Appears

6,Longlist, 2023 National Book Award in PoetryWinner, 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian PoetryFinalist, 2023 Northern California Book Award PoetryLonglist, 2022 Julie Suk AwardWinner, 2019 YesYes Books Pamet River PrizeShelley Wong's debut, As She Appears (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.