Project Bookshelf: Ruoyu Wang

I’m home for winter break from college right now, so the picture right here is actually of my bookshelf at college. I filled about ⅔ of one shelf with all the books I wanted to bring with me from home: a mixture of my favorites in addition to books that I’ve yet to read but thought would be pertinent for my first year away from home. 

My bookshelf is mostly poetry, some essays, two novellas, and two full-length novels. I like to think about my teenage years in terms of which poetry collection felt most formative for me at the time. In 2022, it was Hard Damage by Aria Aber, 2023’s was I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes, and 2024’s was The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan. I know Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is technically a novel written in verse, but I think of it as a poetry collection, so I’ll say that for 2025. There are other novels I love, too, of course, like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (not on my shelf!), but I think I’m a writer who usually wants to talk more about poetry. 

I associate a lot of my favorites with loved ones in my life, so for example, I’ve come to associate I Do Everything I’m Told with my friends Mimi and Andrew, both of whom also love Megan Fernandes’s work. I first read her brilliant sonnet crown “The False Beloveds with One Exception (or, Repetition Compulsion)” online in The Kenyon Review a few summers ago, and I just couldn’t get it out of my head. When I read and reread her poems, I also become obsessed with the orbits of devotion, distance, and the sense of wonder and charm that can lend itself to the messiest, most transitional periods in life. 

One collection I always bring with me everywhere is The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi, which I first read in the fall of 2023 and have reread two or three times since then. It’s quite a short collection—being almost entirely untitled prose poems—but I recommend it to everyone I know and even pulled quotes from it for my Gender Studies project this semester. Dorothea Lasky’s Rome is one I read almost entirely in the waiting area of a Chinese restaurant in Richmond, Canada, and I read Hala Alyan’s The Twenty-Ninth Year in my favorite park, spread across a few days’ sunsets last June. 

I love my book(shelf) collection at school partially because it fits into such a small space, partially because it’s the first thing I see when I exit or enter my dorm room, and partially because on top of it, I can set the Smiski figurines my friends have gifted to me over time. I don’t plan on buying new books anytime soon because I’m trying to take full advantage of my college’s extensive library, but I’m so grateful to have my own bookshelf-library that gets to stay with me through the years.

---

Ruoyu Wang (they/them) is a writer from Seattle. Their poems appear in Sine Theta Magazine, COUNTERCLOCK, and The Shore, and have been recognized by YoungArts, The Adroit Journal, and Narrative Magazine, among others. Currently, they serve as the Founding Director of the SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship and study Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. They love linguistics, postcards, live music, and jasmine milk tea.