By Emily Velasquez
In her most recent collection of poems, Planetaria, visual poet Monica Ong experiments with design, movement, and space to capture the generational migration of women in diaspora. More specifically, the lineage of women in Ong’s family and their place during migration, and what has become of that space. Ong’s diagrams, graphs, and other visual elements are a vital component to the narrative of this collection; they help readers understand her work as an interdisciplinary visual poet. Planetaria captures the female gaze and focuses on the physical, emotional, and cultural structures that have restrained agency or a sense of belonging for women.
Ong creates conversations surrounding placement and identity to discuss how our planet is designed with certain societal expectations about women, their bodies, and how they fit on the map. In companion with these themes, Ong’s visual use of celestial objects and structures beyond earth sparks conversation about the way her lineage of motherhood, memory, and space can exist beyond these spatial enclosures that have interrupted the speaker’s past, present, and future.
In this work, there is a series of poems where the word insomnia reappears in the title. In these poems, Ong refers to the state of insomnia through a spectrum of colors such as jade, lavender, amber, indigo, and yellow, through which these rather translucent colors grasp a connection with the ability to be transparent or be able to visualize those transparencies. Interestingly, each insomnia poem presents itself as a recollection of thoughts that are being shuffled, almost like in a dream state, but in this case, it is the discomforting thoughts that disrupt the sleep state. For example, in “Yellow Insomnia,” Ong writes, “Our shared hurt a constant waking. It is the inability to zoom out and distinguish the wound from the body, the body from the wound. Yellow insomnia is the knowing of being watched by eyes that never learned to see us whole.” In this poem, Ong illustrates two eyes looking down at an image of a sun that is in some way being held by the pupils of these eyes. This idea of not being seen as a whole but being watched is particularly significant since this book captures the female gaze. It turns our attention to experience what it means for a woman to belong within these insomniac places. These places of restlessness that women experience, where they are neither heard nor seen.
Above all, Planetaria is a hybrid collection that exhibits the dimensionalities that coexist between art and literature. Ong dismantles the male gaze that is often projected in writing, media, and other art forms to remap how we engage with the representations of women.
Emily Velasquez is a poet who loves anything about food and cooking. Born and raised in Santa Ana, she received her B.A. in English from California State University Fullerton. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing and an M.A. in English from Chapman University. She is an assistant poetry editor for Narrative.