Publication date: 2024-10-08
ISBN: 9780691264042
Advanced Praise for Stem:
“This is some decomposed music,” declares Wong (Spooks) in her perceptive and gripping sophomore outing, which showcases the luxurious sonics of her poetry (“Submerged/ in the memoriam swamps,” “bodied breath in the blue/ funeral vase, your death/ masked”). This poem, the first in an impressive series of dramatic monologues, vitally and eccentrically captures Wong’s talent for unexpected turns of phrase as she pays tribute to female composers, musicians, and visual artists (among them Johanna Beyer, Mira Calix, and Clara Rockmore). Fittingly, the collection’s music is further “decomposed” by Wong’s use of slashes, a visual interruption that, combined with her playful diction, lends a provocative flippancy to such subjects as God, Satan, and Buddha, who frequently appear as fallible friends of the speaker: “You ask why you weren’t invited to my birthday/ and God, I’m just so tired, especially in your adverse/ conditions, of running after you.” As Wong dips in and out of various personae, her biting cleverness remains consistent throughout. These insistent poems achieve a brash and beautiful irreverence.
-- Publishers Weekly
The poems in this volume demonstrate an extraordinary sensibility, which is imaginative, perceptive, and intrepid. Reading these poems is like riding a verbal roller coaster, full of excitement and surprises.
-- Ha Jin
Stella Wong's Orpheus is female, and the poet herself a forceful Eurydice who refuses to return to the Underground and play dead. She's a switched-on, savvy, confident, get-out-of-the way poet, "naked voiced," aggressively witty, her "expression . . . violent." American poetry just now has need of her fighting spirit. Her lines are not to be dull or sleepy: "Every grapple is over / submission." The poetry is perpetually on the verge of being self-interrupted by its own robustness. It rejects "gray areas." Its vivid imagining doesn't stop. Nodding again and again to various experimental women composers of the 60s and forward, Wong herself has a taste of the synthesizer's surrealism and something of its effect of starting right up and made on the spot. "Where / you don't have a nested hierarchy, . . . the synth is . . . personal, the synth is built." She goes where her uncaptured nature and her powers of observation take her: "The best things to score are / like us, unnumbered."
-- Cal Bedient
In her second collection, Stem, Wong offers a series of poems entitled, ‘Dramatic Monologue…’, followed by the names of several forgotten female composers. These forgotten female composers have tended to specialise in electronic, often avant-garde, music. These poems allow Wong to explore issues such as creativity, technology, and lack of recognition. Amongst the several composers in Wong’s second collection the most well-known are Wendy Carlos, composer of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, and Delia Derbyshire, composer of ‘Dr Who’. Wong’s collection examines how many of these electronic female composers have become absent from musical canons. Wong addresses this lack of recognition in the ‘Dramatic Monologue as Johanna Magdalena Beyer,’: ‘This is some hard / music to listen to. My Dutch clogged /name. What you’ve heard about me is // whom I’ve predated.’
Wong’s female composers produced electronic scores that were site-specific and built around sounds from the immediate environment in which they worked. The everyday sounds that made up their electrical compositions were often amplified. As such, the compositions were, by their very nature, ephemeral. Wong, basing her collection on the music composed by forgotten electronic female composers, examines how art on the fringes is both ephemeral and memorable, as with Johanna Magdalena Beyer, who was born in Germany in 1888 and came to New York in 1923. She started her musical career in a traditional manner, by teaching piano. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Beyer studied with other avant-garde composers, although at the time her performances gained very little critical attention. It wasn’t until the 1980s, some thirty years after Beyer’s untimely death from Lou Gehrig’s disease, that her music was rediscovered and achieved the critical attention it deserves. The line break of ‘Dutch clogged / name,’ across the second and third lines quoted above, might suggest not only how easy it is for an artist’s name, particularly a female artist’s name, to be lost over time, but also lost to the artist themselves. This loss is re-emphasised by the way that ‘whom I’ve predated’ is isolated at the start of the second stanza of the poem. Here, Beyer becomes less herself than a predecessor.
Wong’s ‘Dramatic Monologue as Mira Calix’ begins with a nod to Calix’s alternative career as a DJ. During her career, Calix was a support act for bands including Radiohead and Boards of Canada; she also appeared at Glastonbury. Calix’s monologue begins, ‘You know when you’re one of the ones they used / to work the pilot light or the sax at the blade // runner clubs when you glitch in neoprene / and reject the capitol, capitalism // and neon tube all caps. Really. What’s in a right / click? Glowing ball-joints or peeping // potato eyes.’ What we notice here is the self-directed ‘you’ in the first and third line. This, ‘you’, is contrasted to the ‘they’ in line two; thus, personally pulling the reader into Calix’s life. The personal pull of ‘you’ works against the impersonal musical history that has forgotten her: ‘they’ who ‘used’. The adjectives broken from their nouns across stanza breaks, i.e., ‘blade // runner’, working in conjunction with the long first sentence also pulls the reader into the clubbing world of Calix. The long first sentence is followed by staccato phrases and questions which seem to come from deep in the narrator’s consciousness. The punning reference to ‘capitol, capitalism and neon all caps,’ is because Calix rejected capital letters out of an attachment to e.e. cummings as a child. The awareness of performing as another, which was a key element of Calix’s musical composition, is also demonstrated in Calix’s choice of moving away from her birth name and adopting her artist name. Wong, perhaps in an analogy to Beyer, demonstrates how Calix within her music must perform as somebody else to become recognised.
Many of Wong’s poems explore the ‘I’ of the poem. Wong’s ‘I’ in her dramatic monologues could represent the speaker of the poem. It equally could represent the authorising consciousness of the poem, i.e. Wong as a writer, giving female composers a voice in her poetry. As we have seen in Calix’s dramatic monologue there is often a negotiation with a ‘you’ and a ‘they,’ where ‘they’ may be larger forces outside either the ‘I’ or the ‘you.’ The second person, ‘you,’ so present in ‘Dramatic Monologue as Mira Calix’, occurs throughout Stem. That poem begins with a ‘you’ who is likely to be Calix herself; the ‘You’ negotiating with the ‘Self’, which, in the case of ‘Dramatic Monologue as Myra Calix’, adds a further layer to the doubling. Elsewhere in Wong’s poems, the ‘you’ is an Other, and the address can seem like a way of more fully representing the speaker. The speaker presents perspectives and demands that are as constitutive of the speaker as they are of the addressee, the ‘actual’ second person. In ‘Scorpion W2,’ Wong writes, ‘You’re too pretty / to war with, but that’s what we play at // week after week. Friendly fire / like you should always watch your back // around girls who look / barely legal. / After college, your prized possession // should be owning / your own / washing machine /’. The forward slashes between ‘look/bare’ and ‘owning/your’ and at the end of the quotation, are Wong’s. The ‘you’, here, is treated with some extravagance; the ‘you’ is like ‘friendly fire,’ and its most ‘prized possession should be owning [its] own washing machine.’ The relationship between the speaker and the ‘you/Other’ is almost surreal. Wong’s great ability is to shape these triangulations between the author and personae, between the ‘I’, the ‘you’ and ‘they’, into a world which has considerable resonance and depth. This is a world in which images and ideas are accumulated with a rapid, fizzing, centripetal energy.
-- The Manchester Review
Some of the oddly wayward, dauntless imagery of the forty-one poems herein, account for Stem being an altogether atypical read for all the right reasons; especially for those with an elongated, open mind, all curious, mildly cunning, not too cynical. Not to mention (somehow) timely. Without wanting to appear too poetically prophetic (or wantonly prophetic should I say), Stella Wong’s poetry may be considered a tad socially, if not poetically voyeuristic at times; but in so appearing, it simultaneously borders on both the intense and the profound. I’d also like to add that Stem is full of colour and candour – surely, a magnetic combination?
-- David Marx Book Reviews
Stella Wong wields the kind of weaponry I live to be slayed by. Funny as hell, delightfully strange and full of a sneaky and giant heart, holds its beloved subjects — friends, siblings, Lucy Liu, grapefruits, all the jesuses the poet can muster — and gives them body with wicked imagination and knock-out tenderness. This book will knock the windows of your heart not just open, but out the frame once you see how far Wong can dive into fear and the terrible possibles of humanness can still carry back something like hope, gooder than joy. Wong has crafted a brief, but mighty collection of poems that point towards the bright possibly of power to make us better dreamers, better lovers, better homies, and oh my jesuses how thankful I am for this abundant offering. I'm sure you will be too.
-- Danez Smith
If poetry were a biathlon, Stella Wong would take the gold. She's a solid skier and a crack shot, each poem a bullet hitting its mark. Thank God she's turned all of this energy and accuracy into poetry. 'Where do you put your body of color' she asks. Then proceeds to school everyone. Stella Wong is a force, a maker, a master.
-- D.A. Powell
Spooks is an inquiring of rhythms. Its poems think in rhythms derived from many cultural sources, but most often from hip-hop as filtered through everyday speech—but not only rhythms derived from music, but also rhythms derived from the motions of culture both at the center and the periphery of Stella Wong's attention. While foregrounding various rhythms, the poems in Spooks defy those sources thereof that are rooted in patriarchy and other forms of oppression—these poems ask what new songs can be made of a tainted music, even while being such songs.
-- Shane McCrae
Reading SPOOKS is the most fun I’ve had since dandelion-ing at a fetish party. The titles are brilliant. The speakers of the poems are secret agents, search engineers and dissociative fugues. The poems are elastic with tones that range from hilarious deadpan one-liners to astonishing tenderness. ‘Oh, love is at // no cost to you’ reads one poem and I’m like ‘yr gonna make me cry right after you made me laugh.’ If Catullus were around, he’d be so proud.
-- Cy Jillian Weise
Spooks is, among other things, a generous and richly populated book. The poems are both challenging and welcoming, filled with as many entrances and exits, as much warmth as honest, as much risk as playfulness. This is a beautiful book of enduring images, and masterful storytelling.
-- Hanif Abdurraqib
You and Stella Wong are the last two people on Earth. You’re going to witness her “ride in/to hell” and you will need to prepare yourself for the moment when she decides to use her “daddy voice” on Jesus. You’re the last two people on Earth because the truth—the truth of Stella Wong’s voice, the truth of these poems—has scared away the timid. But be strong. The apocalypse of American Zero is scary and dangerous, yes, but it’s also a lot of fun.
-- Josh Bell