Monica Ong is an Asian American visual poet and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015) and Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Scientific American, Hyperallergic, ctrl+v, The Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. She received the Kore Press First Book Award in Poetry in 2014, and has been named a Kundiman Poetry Fellow and a United States Artists Fellow. Her visual poetry has also been exhibited nationwide at institutions including the Poetry Foundation, Center for Book Arts, and the Hunterdon Art Museum. In 2021, Ong founded Proxima Vera, a micropress and artist imprint specializing in visual poetry. She currently serves as a digital designer at Yale University.

On July 17, 2026, I had the unique opportunity to speak with Monica Ong. From opposite coasts, we connected over Zoom to discuss her journey and her most recent book, Planetaria, where she explores the themes of diaspora, motherhood, and women in science at the intersection of visual art and poetry. Inspired by the ghosts of stars and of those who have come before, she retells the skies through a feminine lens and invites readers to a viewing of constellations as archives of human connection. It was a privilege to have shared this conversation with Monica and to be able to gain insight into the vision behind Planetaria.

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This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kaitlyn Choy (Choy): Your book is gorgeous. The poems are evocative and each of the graphics is captivating with vibrant colors and layered compositions. With the many images throughout Planetaria, how did you decide to use the collage from “Her Hypothesis” for the cover page?

Monica Ong (Ong): The star formation, over the portrait of my father’s brother when he was a child, is a diagram by the astronomer William Herschel. It was his vision of the shape of the universe. I noticed the diagram and the photograph of my uncle have similar alignments and, when I was playing around with collages, he sat almost perfectly behind those stars. Then I added more stars above to make it as though he were floating in space. I thought the combination made sense because, with stars, the light we see travels over time and the star we think we see at that moment has already died. We are really looking at ghosts. Likewise, my father’s brother died rather suddenly and when I look at these photos of him, it is like sitting with his ghost. When I’m writing, I’m often sitting in archives and I never feel alone because I know that I’m writing with ghosts. Thinking about the cover, this star-man collage spoke to me in the sense that I’m playing with these different stories of the stars, but I also find myself in dialogue with these ghosts that accompany me when I write. 

Choy: That’s beautiful. One of my favorite poems is “Book of Vera.” I noticed the triangle diagram—was that inspired by Oliver Byrne’s The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid (1847)?

Ong: You are sharp. I recalled seeing that book, and it was innovative for its time because it used color and design to visually convey these concepts of geometry in an approachable way. I think about Vera Rubin’s story—she was one of the only women “allowed” into the observatory but was met with this hostile situation of being told that there’s no restroom for women—she cut out a triangle, put it on the door, and declared, “Now we have a ladies’ room.” This led me to think about the symbol of the triangle and this idea of science being a field that was a man’s world. If I were to rewrite a science textbook, what would I need to think about to navigate these spaces? Rubin’s story felt inspiring because she didn’t let anybody stop her from being a scientist. I’m amazed at what she was able to accomplish as a mother of four and as one of the early and only women in these spaces. It was her observations of galaxy rotation rates that pioneered the scientific thinking about dark matter. Despite not seeing many female professors or peers around her, she was doing incredible things and didn’t allow the environment to sway her commitment or interest. When I was writing these poems, the driving question was “How would you retell the story of the skies from a woman’s perspective?” It turned me on to stories of early women in science and the importance of leaving behind things that could encourage her generation and the generation coming forward. 

Choy: You studied studio art as an undergraduate and later earned your MFA in digital media. During the making of Planetaria, you were working as a designer at the Digital Humanities Lab. Your background reflects a sustained and impressive engagement with the creative fields. Looking back, can you talk about how you came to see yourself as a writer? How did visual poetry emerge as your chosen medium, and how have your experiences informed your practice and the work you created in Planetaria?

Ong: When I started my creative work, it took the form of everything—sound art, installations, digital works, collage—and I found that there was a strong central axis of narrative. When I was in graduate school, I audited classes at Brown and attended poetry readings to cross-pollinate different influences. I remember coming across the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, as well as Claudia Rankine and Anne Carson, and that there are just as many spaces in literature where form and visual practice come into play as there are in the visual arts where the medium of language comes into play. This feeling that I had to choose started to dissolve and I began making work that felt truer to my own intentions. 

The work was first received in exhibitions, but I was encouraged to translate these works into a poetry manuscript. Learning more about the language poets, the Fluxus era, and concrete poets pushed me to put the work out there and see what happens. In 2014, that manuscript, Silent Anatomies, won the Kore Press First Book Award, selected by Joy Harjo, and suddenly I was publishing a book. I was doing indie press literature, but my studio practice was and continues to be driven by design. With visual poetry, these different aspects feed each other and challenge me to stretch. When I write, it’s for exhibitions and it makes me think about what a poem can be, where it can be, how somebody can interact with it, and what materials it can be made from. Those are exciting questions for me, and as I spent more time deep-diving into the different histories of visual poets, I found that many of them also had multi-faceted careers. William Blake, for example, invented relief etching because the printers of his time would not have been able to publish his work. Ulises Carrión was a conceptual artist-writer who helped to define the genre of artist books with seminal manifestos that speak to this new “art of making books.” These characters made me feel less restricted by these ideas of genre and continue to encourage me to keep exploring.

At the same time, it is about finding different ways to create a public for your work because visual poetry is something that visual artists can also gravitate to. It brings experimentation and play to literary spaces, particularly those that are interested in book arts or new directions in language. I learned a great deal working with traditional small press publishing early in my career, and wanted to bring that together with studio-based design-thinking into my own press specifically built in service to visual poetry. This allows me to make compelling new experiences of reading in any form or shape or interaction that I want to design. It’s deeply rewarding and allows for more creative freedom.

Choy: I like your decision to combine the visual and textual aspects. Planetaria is at the intersection of visual art and poetry, creating a dialogue between image and language. Each visual element—the color palettes, family photographs, and scientific illustrations—feels carefully crafted. They shape the reader’s experience and generate meaning alongside the words. How do you approach the challenge of composing the visual and textual components so that they are in conversation with one another rather than competing for the reader’s attention? 

Ong: It’s not easy. On the one hand, as a creative, you have to trust your instinct. There are times when I’m sifting through archives and looking through diagrams or at the language I’m working with, and I have to trust my sense of where their alchemy is. It’s like cooking; you have certain flavors that accentuate or bring out a different effect in other ingredients. You have to understand your components and what they can elicit from each other. 

With Caroline Herschel’s work, I was thinking about how people didn’t give her the due respect for the labor she had put into analyzing the sky and annotating all the notes and stars for her brother, William Herschel. He was the more famous astronomer, while she was behind the scenes, putting food in his mouth. She devoted much of her life to discoveries that had to be published under his name. So when I was looking at these diagrams that she drew, I thought about the View-Master form. When you look through the View-Master, you are taking the stance of stargazing but with the poems framed in her diagram. We are essentially looking at the fruit of her labor while also getting to spend time in a poem, looking up at the sky as she did. It creates a beautiful space that honors her talent and devotion. With the View-Master, you can only do a few verses at a time, so it’s also about slowing down to savor and take the time to be with her. The painter Ben Shahn said, “Form is the shape of content,” and in that spirit, you want the form to create the best conditions for the reader to sit with the work and, in this case, sit with Caroline. I don’t intellectually overthink it because it comes from a designer’s perspective and from a place of care, which is expressed through the decisions you make about the details. 

With the insomnia poems, I was looking at diagrams from a psychologist who was trying to map the human psyche through geometric shapes. I had this impulse to use the diagrams as a framework for the collages that I made with images of my grandparents and deceased ancestors. Then I would find interesting details that weave in and out, and allude to something in the writing. When I made this into an installation, I custom printed those collages onto silk pillows and recorded the poems similar to meditation tapes. These poems explore the things that keep me up at night, so I even turned them into cassette tapes that people could listen to while they were resting. I had these instincts that kept pushing me further, and it eventually evolved into this installation.

Choy: How do you determine when each layer—the written poem, the visual composition, and their relationship as a unified piece—has reached completion, if at all?

Ong: It depends what completion means. “The Way of Milk,” for example, is a poem which includes a collage of my father with his siblings and this early star map of the Milky Way. When it was published in print, it was complete in the sense of the print experience. But then I wanted to make it into a sculptural piece in an exhibition space. I designed it to fit into a vintage wooden box and, inside, installed LED lights behind the stars to make them look illuminated. The box also had a shelf beneath and, because I had written about my mother’s Chinese lanterns, I included them there. As a sculptural piece, it felt right for these small gallery experiences. But when the show was being installed at the Poetry Foundation, we opted to enlarge the piece to fill the floor-to-ceiling glass windows and the gallery itself became the light box. In a sense, what I love about that is the many ways the poem can be enjoyed. 

When it comes to bringing the work to print, there is a completion, but sometimes it’s just one of a few stopping points. The joy of being a designer is that you can reimagine poems for different spaces to have different effects. When I’m in the composition process, I will pause if I find that the piece can clearly exist both on the page and in an exhibition space. The last stop is usually asking, “how are all of these elements coming together in a printed collection?” The works undergo a lot of visual translation, but once I can conceive them into a realized manuscript, I get very excited.

Choy: In poems such as “Lunar Volvelle” and “The Star Gazer,” there are footnotes that indicate one possible reading, inviting readers to entertain a multitude of perspectives on the same text. The structure of your book follows a similar pattern, as many of the image-poems precede the traditionally formatted text. The initial exposure causes readers to approach with an interpretive freedom, and then when introduced to the more conventional poem, rather than having to dismiss their prior thoughts, audiences become grounded with an understanding that multiple truths can coexist. Can you talk more about this choice to resist fixedness?

Ong: I want to offer an experience that moves away from the author telling the audience how to read the poem and toward something more horizontal, where it’s an invitation to collaborate. As a designer, I pay attention to how people interact with poems. Some readers enjoy being able to return to a poem and discover something new each time, while others prefer guidance. I’m very much “yes, and…” but the idea of preceding with openness before the transcription came from people saying, “Don’t give me the answer key before the puzzle.” Understanding that there are these two edges of the spectrum, I was thinking about the sequence and how when you walk into a gallery, you don’t know what’s coming and you’re just experiencing it. I trust my readers. I believe in their creativity, their intelligence, their playfulness. I want to leave it open, but I also understand a sense of responsibility to provide for other readers by offering one possible interpretation while still inviting them to trust their own wandering. To me, it’s exciting to think about the new types of relationships that we can cultivate and the kinds of readings that we can be open to.

Choy: I like that you consider different types of audiences. You have referenced several female figures in science history who made significant contributions to their respective fields but were overlooked in favor of their male counterparts. Wang Zhenyi, Vera Rubin, Caroline Herschel, Valentina Tereshkova, and Dr. Chein-Shiung Wu are among the many women whose achievements have been underrecognized. What does it mean to you, as an author working within a field that has historically prioritized male voices, to give the deserved recognition to these women and discuss female intellect and perseverance? 

Ong: With any output we make, people give up their time and attention to be with something you’re producing. Being able to make a space where we can bring our attention to labor and effort and amazingness that deserves more attention is something that I have a tendency towards. I also have a tendency towards stories that need to be heard, and because poetry points to things that are unspoken, that’s what comes out when we make these kinds of spaces.

It is also a form of celebration because we are living in times that are confusing and where there are many communities being overlooked. Why not create work where we can continue to celebrate people? We can’t wait around for other people to bring joy to us, or hope that our environment will change first to bring that attention and respect that’s due. As an artist, to create work and take the initiative to activate spaces where we can celebrate one another and bring communities around something is a way of maintaining our sense of agency. It’s just joyful to do.

Choy: It is rewarding. Thank you again for your time and talking with me about your book.

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