Ally Ang’s Let the Moon Wobble (Alice James Books, 2025) is a timely poetry collection rich with bold reclamations of life from systems designed to harm. Ang’s unapologetic poetic voice is inspiring; they announce their queerness with the power of community behind every word, writing, “queer as in death to cops and politicians! / May they live their every waking moment / afraid of what the people will do to them” (47). The defiance throughout Let the Moon Wobble is a call to action for all; Ang asserts that the world can change for the better if we can imagine it, manifest it, and celebrate ourselves for all that we are and all that we have been through.

Let the Moon Wobble is organized into three sections with “Invocation” proceeding them. This poem’s first line is the title of the entire collection, and each subsequent line begins with “Let…” Ang here invites readers into a type of prayer, a summoning of what we need to heal, to be safe, to connect with the best parts of ourselves:

“Let the basil plant flower.

Let the poets discombobulate.

Let the verbs noun. Let the nouns verb.

Let the grief howl.” (1)

As a poet myself, I love the line above about allowing writers to be inventive with language, to take so-called standard grammatical rules as mere suggestions. Ang is reaching for a world where every single thing, big or small, is safe to be as it needs to be: the basil plant, the moon, the grief. Upon reading this poem, I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s “Transpositions,” a short poem in which he similarly calls for a reversal of power dynamics, of what is wrongfully accepted without enough resistance. “Invocation” ends on a repeated call for the people to be free, a notion asserted throughout the collection.

One of the most touching poems of the collection for me is “June 23, 1982,” dedicated to Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man murdered by two white men who ended up not receiving any jail time. Ang starts the poem sweetly:

“Vincent shyly kissing his fiancée at the bar

egged on by his friends’ pillowing laughter

Vincent, face warm and aglow

after just two beers

Vincent, pulling a strand of her shiny black hair

off the sleeve of his coat and tucking it

into his breast pocket…” (18)

Words like pillowing and warm show that Vincent is safe, surrounded by loved ones and feeling loved. The small gesture of saving the hair strand, keeping it close to his heart, becomes more heartbreaking as we are guided towards the tragic end of the night. Ang foreshadows the darkness ahead for readers who have not skipped to the note section before proceeding to read “June 23, 1982” with the lines, “Vincent, mother’s only baby, assuring her / that this would be his last time going out” and how “it’s bad luck to say last time” (18). This poem serves as an elegiac ode to the life and goodness Vincent had, as well as a condemnation of the “good boys, / not the kind of men you send to jail” (19) and the racist and patriarchal systems designed to protect the few and enact violence on the many.

In their insistence on creativity, ingenuity, and joy, Ang employs a number of unique poetic forms as containers for sometimes heavy subject matter. For example, “Heartbreak Mad Libs” uses the form of the classic game to make space for possibility within a set script. Readers can fill in their own answers to categories such as “# of your lover’s hairs stuck in the shower drain,” “type of love you lacked in childhood,” and “the source of the light in your eyes” (37). Ang here is offering a tool for healing, for readers to walk into and through their own heartbreak, reaching hope on the other side. “The Truth Is” is a multiple choice poem, similarly giving readers, and themself as poet, space to explore and invite options. The truth does not need to be one thing, Ang seemingly asserts; it can change over time, it is different from person to person, etc. Other poem titles like “Quars Poetica” and “Owed to My Father’s Accent” are playful with craft words; ars poetica is queered, an ode is combined with reverence and due credit.

In the penultimate poem, “You Deserve the World,” Ang writes,

“The world has ended before,

and before and before, and for some, there was

no after. We have watched its rind cracking open

like a freshly-broken heart, and each time

            we build and rebuild.” (61)

I see echoes here of Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, The World Goes On, and of the afro-futurist notion that the apocalypse has already happened. Despite this reality, Ang is a part of the survival; they are a part of the continued living, full of desire, hope, joy, culture, energy, and strength. The title phrase “you deserve the world” is an affirmation that we have every right to live, to be our full selves, and to enjoy a safe world, including all of its pleasures, treasures, and wonders.

Let the Moon Wobble is a brilliant debut collection I encourage all readers of contemporary poetry to get their hands on. Ang’s words act as an invitation to incite joy, a decree of justice, a celebration of queerness, and a mastering of poetic voice amidst a large variety of form. In “The Moon, Abstracted,” Ang writes, “From Palestine / to West Papua, from Puerto Rico / to Hawai’i, from Congo to Sudan, / from the river to the sea. / …  / May every / oppressed tongue know the taste / of water, honey, freedom, freedom” (10). I firmly stand with Ang in this call for freedom, safety, and nourishment for all. As Ang invokes, may we see this come to fruition in our lifetimes.

Let the Moon Wobble is available from Alice James Books

---

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is Cofounder and Managing Editor at Two Cardinals Literary. At Sundress Publications, she serves as Assistant Chapbook Editor. Livia has been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA in poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. 

Gee follows a trail of breadcrumb memories back through her adolescence and into her childhood, arriving at an explanation for her conversion to Catholicism in adulthood. With the precision of an academic historian, Gee sifts through her past as she contemplates where her pull to the divine originated:

“It’s hard not to wonder if there was a single moment that set me on my way to becoming a person of faith. This calling surprised me with its suddenness and vigor, and then with how quickly it became an anchor in our lives…My conversion, which was always a process and never a point in time, felt new and familiar, an aspiring toward a more expansive self, but one I ultimately recognized.” (Gee 50)

This “ultimate recognition” of a new aspect of the self becomes a North Star in Gee’s journey through Catholic conversion. 

So, too, does the Church community that she names as the main reason she stays in her parish, despite the long and bureaucratic road to official conversion. The people in her church validate a long-overlooked part of herself: “Perhaps I finally recognized my spirituality once I could see it in others, in the same way I recognize myself in the features and gestures of my daughters” (Gee 71). This observation is one of many moments in this collection linking Gee’s conversion process to an exploration of family and what we pass down to our children. As an adoptee from Taiwan, Gee felt constant pressure from her Cantonese parents to show her gratitude by erasing her own desires – especially any related to learning about her birth family. Instead, she attempted to piece together her identity through the heritage her parents relayed to her inconsistently, in scraps of “smoke” and “paper”.

Torn between a desire for her child to assimilate seamlessly into America and a need to keep Chinese traditions alive, Gee’s mother served as the curator of a new kind of family history. Gee detailed her tenuous position:

“My mom is Chinese until she is not. She must do figures in her head in Cantonese; she must eat rice with every meal, fearfully appease ancestors, and call my husband American, but never herself and never me. Until she visits China after forty-five years of living in America and is told that her clothes and hair and speech and posture are all unmistakably foreign. Until she is interviewed by an adoption agency and must, against all her Chinese sensibilities, express her longing for a child.” (Gee 55)

Gee’s writing shines in these heartwrenching remembrances of her parents. She later describes one of her mother’s favorite stories: of how, during the famine caused by the Cultural Revolution in China, her mother (around age 10 at the time) cried when she had no fish to eat for dinner. Gee’s grandmother threatened to leave the home, and Gee’s mother promised to never complain again. Gee describes how her mother, re-traumatized, told this story compulsively and frenetically, in a “flood” through which a young Gee held steady. Gee inherited her mother’s trauma, internalizing as a child that “good mothers threatened their children…to keep their daughters from wanting what they cannot have” (Gee 123). Gee reckons with the lofty expectations placed upon her from a young age through her parents also wanting what they could not have: a biological child that they tried to conceive in vain for over a decade. She “…sometimes imagine[s] [her] parents sitting down to a meal they have waited fourteen years for, starved beyond hunger and unable to believe their agony will finally end” (Gee 156). Emotional and physical hunger are evocatively rendered across time and space – from the liturgies of takeout from her grandfather’s restaurant to the stress associated with feeding an entire extended family. Unmet hunger as a representation of generational immigrant trauma is one of the most memorable, and powerful, motifs of this collection.

As an adult, Gee makes sense of the trauma in a monumental loss of culture, an enormous grief of immigration, through the language of Catholicism. Specifically, the ritual of initiation welcomes one’s new self into the Catholic church, honoring the struggles of separating from what is familiar in order to return with a deeper knowledge of the self (Michael Meade; Gee 99). She writes: “My family’s immigration is a kind of incomplete initiation—unending separation compounded with the absence of a society to return to” (Gee 99). In translating her family’s generational trauma into a newly intelligible language, Gee guides the reader through her parallel journeys of healing and conversion.

I was, and am, stunned by the tenderness Gee writes with, and holds for those who have hurt her. We Carry Smoke and Paper invites us to look more closely at the ashes we have been handed, thank those who placed them in our palms, and decide, ultimately, what we would like to keep.

Order your copy today!

---

Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.