As She Appears

Longlist, 2023 National Book Award in Poetry

Winner, 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry

Finalist, 2023 Northern California Book Award Poetry

Longlist, 2022 Julie Suk Award

Winner, 2019 YesYes Books Pamet River Prize

Shelley 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.