Planetaria
Rewriting the sky from a female perspective, Monica Ong invites readers into the intimate cosmology of Planetaria, utilizing the visual language of astronomy to explore the precarious territories of motherhood, women in science, and diaspora identity. This collection examines the power struggles that myth-making elicits through the alchemy of text and image hybrids.
With a foreword by art critic and poet John Yau, these poems move through constellations, across ancestral skies, turning wide-eyed insomnia into nocturnes in search of home. This full color collection includes gallery views of the poems as installations, fine press and interactive works, giving full expression to Ong’s interdisciplinary practice of visual poetry. If poetry and astronomy were to throw an art party, this one welcomes audiences across disciplines and cultures to imagine new cosmographies where everyone belongs.
COMING MAY 31, 2025
Praise for Planetaria
“Planetaria by Monica Ong is a one-of-a-kind collection of visual poetry. Every page is a kind of experiment between the visual and language, as if to say that the medium in which language constellates is just as dynamic as language itself, and that the medium unleashes the power of language. The themes in Planetaria are many—from motherhood to science to diaspora to arguments about transcending restrictive traditions. These pieces are ultimately invitations to listen in on the constellations speaking to each other and the ricocheting with language. Ong is boldly pushing forward into the night sky, and we’re pulled forward with her, into a cosmic incantation.”
—VICTORIA CHANG, author of Obit
“Pulling fragments of fact and feeling together into a beautiful whole, pushing boundaries between history and astronomy to make the unknown knowable, Monica Ong has created a bridge between the past and the present, between the individual and the cosmos—drawn from that ‘awe for the mysterious’ that Albert Einstein called the source of all true art and science. Embedded in this stunning book of visual poetry is also an artfully curated gallery of astronomical images to be read and heard and also to be seen. Planetaria is amazing.”
—CHARLES LIU, astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History and author of The Cosmos Explained
“Planetaria opens with a sonic boom of sound and visual galaxies teeming with the litany of lineages. In ‘Lunar Volvelle,’ the reader is encouraged to be guided by the moon to map the poem: ‘Fear not. During the full moon my father’s mother will guide you,’ which adds to the magic between the pages of this brilliant collection, scrying a new future with each read. Many books can be described as incantations, as spells, but Planetaria can only be described as an ever-changing star chart of those who have lived and are living, in the physical plane or through uttered memory. A book that is ancestrally feminine and observant with the precision of an atom, this experience of graphic texts, verse, and the constellations we make up show Ong getting at the root of what it means to find one of the many ways back home.”