Contemporary Authors

• elsa: an unauthorized autobiography - 2017 Black Radish Books, https://smile.amazon.com/elsa-autobiography-Angela-Veronica-Wong/dp/0997952423/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1516333866&sr=8-2&keywords=Wong%2C+Angela+Veronica
• how to survive a hotel fire - 2012 Coconut Books, https://smile.amazon.com/survive-hotel-fire-Angela-Veronica/dp/1938055004/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1516333866&sr=8-5&keywords=Wong%2C+Angela+Veronica

• Angela Veronica Wong - https://www.angelaveronicawong.com/bio/

  Angela Veronica Wong is a writer, artist, and educator living in New York City.

  Her poetry has won the Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize, The Frost Place Chapbook Contest, Slash Pine Chapbook Contest, Fordham University Poets Out Loud Prize and a semi-finalist for Center For Book Arts Chapbook Competition and Akron Poetry Prize. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and the Best of the Net.

  Her performance work has been featured in independent galleries in Buffalo, Toronto, and New York City.

• Redivider - http://www.redividerjournal.org/angela-veronica-wong-december-2011/

  Angela Veronica Wong, December 2011
  December 19, 2011 webadmin 0 Comment
  Author Interview

  redivider3

  Angela Veronica Wong‘s Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter was selected by Bob Hicok as a winner of the 2011 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship. She is also the author of five other chapbooks, including a forthcoming e-chapbook on YesYes Books. Her first full-length collection of poems is entitled how to survive a hotel fire and is forthcoming from Coconut Books in Spring 2012. She is on the internet at www.angelaveronicawong.com.

  Redivider: Most people are comfortable with the idea of a spirit animal or power animal–but who is your spirit poet/power poet?

  Angela Veronica Wong: I’m not sure I’m defining spirit poet correctly, but there are so many poets who have guided me, changed me, informed my understanding of language – I love that I continue to be surprised, envious, and inspired by the things that other writers do with words. Barbara Guest and Myung Mi Kim come to mind; Anne Carson and Gertrude Stein; or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Marguerite Duras, because these are writers who question and push boundaries and are unapologetic and fearless. But I think my gut answer would be Sylvia Plath, whose control of line, language, and the performance within poetry is something that I will always be in awe of. Her poems are simultaneously managed and calculated but so explosive in emotionality and tone – it’s such a remarkably difficult balance to achieve.

  R: Your poems to appear in Redivider 9.1 seem to exist without a specific location but I’ve found in some of your other poems (like here: http://www.vinylpoetry.org/volume-2/angela-veronica-wong/ for instance) New York is, if not the star, a leading lady. How does your relationship with New York (or location in general) interact with your poetry?

  AVW: The concreteness of a determined place, a location, in the poems I write is a bit of a new development for me. I feel like in the past I’ve written much more abstractly about place.

  To directly address New York, it’s this strange, magnificent place that you become involved with in some way, especially after you’ve lived here for a while. It’s wonderful and thrilling and cruel and extravagant and exhausting and painful to live in New York City.

  I do love the busyness of the city. It challenges my brain and presents me with small, beautiful things every single day. Still though, it’s a city where you are constantly negotiating the duality of visibility and invisibility, where you can constantly have millions of bodies swirling around yours, but it can be incredibly isolating.

  I love, also, to know other people’s reaction and understanding of New York – I love how every person’s New York is different, how I can meet someone on the other side of the world who lived in New York at the same time I did, but experienced and loved and lived a completely different life.

  As for the poems in Redivider 9.1, I can see why they seem to exist without a specific location, but they are very much derived from one place. The poems are an excerpt from a longer series, and a majority of the lines were written when I visited Green Island (綠島) for three days this past April. The series itself was put together within days of returning from the trip.

  Green Island is a small island off the eastern coast of Taiwan and it was used to hold political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period. It is a beautiful island and now is known as a great diving and snorkeling site. When I went – perhaps it was because it was a weekday and moody weather, so there weren’t a lot of people around – I could still feel its lingering history, especially as we walked through the old prison grounds. The island is never mentioned by name during the series, but I hope the reader gets from the poems the setting of ocean and beach in the context of isolation and change, of things that are uncontrollable, of that feeling of missing someone or something.

  R: What would you say are some of your crucial or keywords in your vocabulary inventory? Also, which words excite you (perhaps words that you have not yet used in your work but are trying to find ways to bring them in)?

  AVW: This question makes me think about writerly obsessions-we all have them, words or themes. It is revealing (and sometimes embarrassing) to realize how and what things are repeated and whether that changes or evolves. I write a lot of serial poems, which tends to magnify obsession.

  My first full-length collection is being published by Coconut Books in the spring, and because all but one poem were written in a six-month span, I can really see the patterning. For this collection in particular, images and words that repeat include: the water and ocean; make-up (mascara, specifically) and hair; articles of clothing; beds; and a lot of things that have to do with the kitchen. But these words repeatedly appear because to me they represent a lot of “larger” themes: the presentation and interpretation of identity, the physical body and the intersection of public space and intimacy, gender and domesticity.

  I recently completed a collaborative chapbook with a friend (and awesome poet), Steven Karl, which will be published by Lame House Press in February 2012. I bring this up because it was really fun to work with someone else’s words and obsessions and to see how someone works with yours. I remember a mutual friend (the fabulous poet Amy Lawless) telling me about Steven reading one of the poems and saying, “I could tell it was it was from your collaborative poems because there was such a Veronica word in there.” I love that! Similarly, Steven has some wonderful poems on grapefruits, and one of my poems from the chapbook has the word grapefruit, which came about rather organically, but as soon as I wrote the word, I thought of his poems.

  As for words that excite me, that is harder to answer. I do make a note of words, particularly ones I like the sounds of, but I tend more to work with lines or ideas. For the past year, I’ve been really into writing poems for a title – if I think something would make a great title of a poem, I’ll write that down to play with. For example, I walked past a music store in Atlanta recently with crates of old records out front and saw one that said: “88 lines about 44 women.” I think that would make such an amazing poem!

  Incidentally, the full-length is entitled how to survive a hotel fire and features about forty poems on how to survive a hotel fire. This is just me admitting that I’m prone to obsession.

  R: Can you talk more about your process for writing collaborative poems–such as, how do you begin and then how to you proceed?

  I think each collaboration works (and each set of collaborators work) differently. The collaboration I refer to earlier (with Steven Karl) came about simply – I don’t even think we knew it was “a collaboration” until it was finished. Basically, I sent him a poem just to look over, and he responded with a poem of his own. I wrote one back, and we kept doing that until we stopped.

  Ending the series was somewhat intuitive and somewhat situational – we realized we had enough poems for a chapbook and there was a deadline for a contest coming up. Like I said, there was never a structure imposed on this collaboration (other than the back-and-forth), so I suppose we could’ve just kept going, but it did feel like a good endpoint. We then went through and made edits to our own poems, considered the poem order, came up with a title and sent it out.

  Other collaborations I have worked/am working on are higher concept – as in, there is a chosen theme and then poems are written to fit that theme, but usually there is still a bit of a back-and-forth. And I’m currently working on a novel in which the chapters are alternate because it is told through two characters.

  Some collaborations are a bit looser, more like an exchange of words/language/ideas than exchanging poems, with idea that we will shape things later.

  I enjoy what is produced out of any collaboration, even if it becomes only an exercise or doesn’t “go anywhere” in the sense of publications. It is, in a sense, stretching, asking yourself to enter into unknown spaces. But it also allows for writing to become a social activity – and it gives you this insight into someone else’s process, someone else’s language, which I always find beneficial to my writing.

  R: What’s your favorite poem you’ve written based on a title you found/created and what makes it your favorite?

  AVW: A majority of the poems in the forthcoming book falls within that category – as I said, I wrote about 40 poems with the title (or some variation of)”HOW TO SURVIVE A HOTEL FIRE.” But because I went into writing the Hotel Fire poems knowing they would be a series (I don’t always), it’s hard for me to take them completely out of context. In other words, it’s hard for me to evaluate them without the knowledge of how they work against the other poems. I do have Hotel Fire poems I like better than others, but that often changes based on how I’m feeling or what I wearing, and it feels unfair to call them out.

  Many of the poems I contributed to the Lame House Press chapbook (the forthcoming collaboration) were written that way as well, in that I would steal a line from Steven’s poem and start from there.

  And in a way the poems in Redivider and the series from which they were taken were also written in that manner – I decided on the title early in its construction, and then ended up forming the poems. I think the actual words had already been written down, they weren’t poems yet. If that makes sense.

  All of this is just saying that I don’t know if I can answer that question! But the REDIVIDER poems and that series is really close to my heart for a variety of reasons, so if forced to choose, I would have to say that series. I’m not sucking up to you guys, I actually do just like those poems.

  R: What can we look forward to in the future world of Angela Veronica Wong? You mentioned your book on Coconut but anything else you’d like to direct us to, mention, emphasize, etc?

  AVW: I am so fortunate to have a few projects coming into fruition in 2012. The major one, of course, is the full-length collection how to survive a hotel fire on Coconut Books, which is this fantastic press with an amazingly thoughtful, smart and kind editor, Bruce Covey. I’m not positive when the book will be available to pre-order (hopefully by February 2012) but it will be officially out in the Spring, and you should check out all the other amazing books available on Coconut: http://www.coconutpoetry.org/books1

  If you can’t wait until then to find out how to survive a hotel fire, Katherine Sullivan and the great people at YesYes Books will be putting out an e-chapbook of some of the Hotel Fire poems in the next month or so. She publishes some enviously talented writers, and I’m flattered to be included with the group. (Check it out here.)

  I am also working on this super-fun young adult novel with a good friend and writer Reinhardt Suarez. It doesn’t have a home yet, but we are looking for one and I’m so excited for its possibilities. (Reinhardt probably hates me because I’m always bugging him to get me his next chapter, but I just have to know what happens to his character!)

  There are some other things brewing as well, which I will share with the whole world on the internet on www.angelaveronicawong.com. But more importantly, I want to read more. I want to collaborate more. I want to go to libraries more. I want to talk to my friends more. I want to cook more. I think I want to be on Twitter-less. I know I want to travel more. I suppose that is more what I am looking forward to in the future.

Elsa
Publishers Weekly.
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p35. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Elsa
Angela Veronica Wong. Black Radish, $17 trade paper (82p) ISBN 978-0-9979524-2-1
In her second full-length collection, Wong (How to Survive a Hotel Fire) follows the exploits of Elsa, an 18th-century courtesan living at Versailles's Pare aux Cerfs along with the other mistresses of Louis XV. Wong explores the confines and contradictions of patriarchy, the injustices of imperialism and class division, and the fever-pitch potential of revolution. All of the poems are sonnet variations, which serves Wong in illustrating occasions of rebellion within a constricted environment. Wong describes Elsa as "a girl/ fashioned from sticks and whale blubber" and "a ginger/ cat stalking the moonlight" and addresses her directly: "Don't meddle in/ politics, Elsa, but if you do,/ practice becoming the Queen of France." Elsa, ferried to France as a girl in a cage, is reduced to animal stature and kept like the rest of the king's menagerie. The poems and the relationships described therein witness intersecting sex and violence; there are predators and prey, though these designations are constantly in flux and precarious in the face of revolt: "The nobility/ are great trees losing their roots, still proud/ of their foliage." As an imagined history, this book is rich with sensory detail and shrewd interpersonal politics; as a screed on the perpetual cycle of objectification, it is timely and stirring. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Elsa." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 35. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc
/A492435603/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1666fcb7. Accessed 18 Jan. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435603
1 of 1 1/18/18, 9:49 PM

• Huffington Post
  https://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/july-2012-contemporary-po_b_1690087.html
  Word count: 299

  5. How to Survive a Hotel Fire, Angela Veronica Wong (Coconut Books, 2012). On first read, the first blush comes: there is groaningly, even achingly eager naivete in all this. Surely we must no longer be struck by simple facts about flowers and the sun? Then we reconsider: Which is the truer, the poetry that is exacting about what is, or the poetry prettily evasive in speaking of what is not, a poetry whose metaphoric energies are spilled entirely in the expression of increasingly unlikely poetic sentiments? Then we reread, and we find in How to Survive a Hotel Fire the authentic chronicle of a lived experience a hundred million journaling teens will never touch the corner of: what is finally and forcefully impressed upon us when we are in love, and not; alone, and not; joyful, and not; contemplative, and not; warm-hearted, and not. Wong’s language is simple, earnest, and unadorned, and her reflections generally brief, to-the-point, and reflective—without the concurrent noodling of reflexive sentimentalism. This book is filled with things that happened, or could happen, or could not but should be possible, or could not and should not be possible anywhere but in the eye of the heart. The story here is of an unremarkable romance, which is entirely the point: this is not the million-to-one love, it’s the one-to-one love, the one that matters because it actually happens. To become smitten with this book is easy; to fully appreciate its elegant simplicity, a harder yet even more rewarding task. If you’ve ever doubted that poetry can do the most basic form of manual labor—to reify the softer anxieties implicit in modern living—read this book and receive your corrective. [Excerpt: from “What We Learn About Trust”; Three Poems (from uncollected work)].

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2012/10/how-to-survive-a-hotel-fire-by-veronica-wong/
  Word count: 1032

  “How to Survive a Hotel Fire” by Veronica Wong

  Reviewed By April Naoko Heck

  October 17th, 2012

  In how to survive a hotel fire, the delightful debut from New York poet Angela Veronica Wong (a 2011 winner of the esteemed PSA Chapbook Fellowship), the first thing you might notice is the author’s attention to structure and form. Of the book’s six sections, the first and last are each comprised of a single poem, while the middle sections each shift from form to form. The poems (or perhaps they are parts of one serial poem) in section two are untitled small, justified blocks of text; poems in section three are unjustified and centered on the page; and so on. The organization is tidy and cohesive, offering a backdrop of stability when language itself turns unstable.

  These poems are generally short, their lines of black type afloat in abundant white space, an effect heightened by the book’s pleasing wide, square format. These lonely little islands of text are an apt metaphor for the personae that emerge from Wong’s work: by turns yearning, broken-hearted, anxious, giddy, lost, bored, wistful, philosophical—and often isolated. Here, one of the poems in its entirety from the series bearing the book’s title:

  It’s great

  to be an adult!
  You can make soup

  for breakfast but

  if you live by yourself then

  you are the one

  who has to go out

  and buy the chicken.

  The second person here of course is a transparent disguise for first; we assume the narrator lives alone. The voice is typical of other poems in the collection: chatty, personal, cynical, cosmopolitan, and utterly entertaining. The voice of an intriguing dinner guest gossiping, confessing in your ear. The kind of guest you are relieved to have been seated next to, not someone’s boorish husband.

  Wong’s urbane sense of humor—one of her strengths—recalls Frank O’Hara (I’m thinking of “Having a Coke with You”). Some stellar comedic moments I wish I’d written: “Sometimes I get sentimental and I think: I miss / you. But then I remember I’m dehydrated (page 59)”; “When I get married I will invite all the men I have ever slept with.

  They will all be members of the band…. Afterwards, they could form an ultimate Frisbee team”; “Sometimes I think I could spend my life having my face shoved into pillows if I didn’t fear becoming emotionally detached (page 76).” In the poem “In Which Our Heroine Packs for a Weekend Getaway,” our heroine’s suitcase “is all / hairpins and lingerie, / vanilla scented lotion. / High heels. // Someone once said anticipation / beats actualization….” I can’t help picturing Carrie Bradshaw packing for the Hamptons, or that costly wisp of a nightgown I once purchased for such a getaway, the credit-card charge at Saks more thrilling than the trip itself.

  Wong excels at writing in a key that is wonderfully charming, playful, and funny. She is also capable of penning downright gorgeous passages of heightened lyricism, which I would love to see more of in her future projects. (I sense that the poet distrusts classically beautiful language and traditional narrative—perhaps for fear of boring the reader—but I find that they serve as welcome counterpoints to more abstract, dislocating moments in her writing.) One of my favorite poems, appearing in the second section, reads:

  I keep making mistakes like looking at the
  sky and expecting to see stars when we
  all know all it really is is a dark cloth with
  holes. There are butterflies that fly only in
  pairs, chasing each other in spirals rising
  to the sun like our first thoughts after waking.

  Other favorite lines: “I like words that are what they do—break- / waters break water” (page 28); “By leaving my hair unwashed, I have brought the / ocean into our bed” (page 69). Stunning.

  If a single moment could sum up the book, it would be this, a centerpiece appearing nearly in the middle of the collection:

  Outside her window the city
  is ripping something apart solely
  for the sake of putting it back together again.
  Inside her skin holds her body in place.

  These lines reiterate the book title’s themes: fire—that is, destruction, violence, resurrection.

  Survival—putting things back together, a body held in place. The restless state which the speaker projects upon her external landscape (a reflection of her internal landscape) is perhaps a symptom of homesickness. If a book is a journey, the speaker is searching for a home, and if not a home, a resting place. The hotel from the collection’s title and series (comprising the fifth section) is merely a temporary home, a space of arrival and departure, of transience and semblance.

  The collection closes with an anti-fairytale about a princess, “In the Kingdom We Are Now.” If fairytales are about escape—and about lessons that can be learned within the safety of a few pages—this tale offers neither respite nor friendly warning. The princess has a list of eight things to do; number three “was to do undo everything on the list…. she ended up right where she started in time, but everything was undone. Strange, she thought.

  This must be shadow puppetry, she said to herself, how everything is a ghost of what it was before.” The princess is isolated and lost in a seemingly inert world, no potential for transformation. The princess is not a poet, but we never forget that she is written by one, a very good one indeed.

  April Naoko Heck's first collection of poems, "A Nuclear Family," is forthcoming from UpSet Press in fall 2013. Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including the "Asian American Literary Review" and "Cleveland Plain Dealer." She works as the Readings Coordinator in the NYU Creative Writing Program. More from this author →

• Sink
  http://sinkreview.org/reviews/angela-veronica-wongs-how-to-survive-a-hotel-fire.html
  Word count: 829

  When, in the fourth section of her collection, Angela Veronica Wong begins interchanging the repeatedly recurring poem title, "How to Survive a Hotel Fire," with "How to Start a Hotel Fire," she forces us to consider "survive" and "start" in relation to each other. Are these actions opposite? Does one action preclude the other? Wong’s poems traffic in delightfully irreverent language coupled with surreal cause and effect scenarios, but it is this difference between surviving the titular fire and starting it that provides one of the collection’s most compelling tensions.

  Perhaps one of the most intriguing poems in the entire collection is the two-line poem near the end of the collection:

  "How to Start Survive a Hotel Fire"

  The cross out is not about forgetting it’s a violent revision.
  All the male doctors and the female nurses in pink. (92)

  The crossed out words call attention to themselves rather than disappearing from the final draft as they might normally do, and we find the meat of the poem there. The second line of the poem is so banal (while still undercutting the expected) that we turn to the relationship between the crossed out ‘start’ in the title and the ‘violent revision’ in the first line. Does the “cross out” refer to the strikethrough in the title or to the line it itself appears in? Did the narrator actually start the fire? The suggestion is removed here, but is reintroduced 11 pages later when it actually replaces "survive" in the title.

  It is not until the last of these "How to Start a Hotel Fire" poems that we realize that Wong is not making a narrative choice, but rather is exploring the word switch and its implications, "This is when I reach out and slide my hand / inside my sentences to see how they shift" (110). Later in the poem, she investigates other substitutions,

  Here we can substitute in consideration with in relation acknowledging the ways that
  would change the meaning

  We cannot substitute essence for meaning (110).

  Meaning is fluid and dependent on the relationships between words, but essence never changes and is inherent to the thing itself. A chair remains a chair--an object made for us to sit on--when set by a table, or a television, or a piano, but the significance of its placement there, its meaning, changes slightly with each variation. Wong’s substitutions call attention to the difficulty we face in finding meaning, especially when the words keep changing. Switching "survive" to "start" transforms a tragic situation from a no-fault, act-of-god into a crime and the narrator into a dangerous figure. And yet, as above with "in consideration" and "in relation", the difference between some phrasing is a matter of fine shading and connotation.

  The rest of Wong’s collection shifts meaning in similar ways. In the fourth section of the book, "What We Learn About Trust," Wong strips the serious phrase "broken neck" of its impact by repeating it in every line of one of its untitled poems,

  the vase with the broken neck
  the banana with the broken neck
  the bottle with the broken neck
  the virgin with the broken neck
  the cello with the broken neck (61)

  If you aren’t careful, you might miss the death in the fourth line, nestled as it is between so many more mundane items. Elsewhere, Wong undercuts dire, serious statements by equating them with the banal:

  i've never been kicked out like that before. i can barely
  bear anything anymore, which is to say i
  need a boyfriend because carrying my own stuff
  is boring. (77)

  Though she shifts from first to third person between sections, the narrator’s voice throughout the collection is that of a surrealist neurotic, "She always thought it was / the always thinking / that got her in trouble"(43). The poems are often dream-like and in a stream of consciousness form.

  Still it is the repetition, both within poems and across the collection that truly shapes this book. The repeated titles in section four are joined by those in section three, "In Which Lessons Should Not Be Learned." All the titles in this third section begin with the words 'in which' and many include the words "Our Heroine." The repetition provides those sections with a sense of unity, but it also promotes a sense of time standing still in the experience of reading the poems.

  How to Survive a Hotel Fire slips from form to form between each section, shifts and substitutes words and phrases and plays with variation from repetition. Wong arranges her language like a jazz piano player riffs on a theme and in doing so, pulls us into her world of old socks, lost buttons, air raid drills and gentlemen's clubs.

• The Diagram
  http://thediagram.com/12_5/rev_wong.html
  Word count: 1473

  REVIEW

  Angela Veronica Wong, how to survive a hotel fire, [press & date]

  Reviewed by Tony Mancus

  [Review Guidelines]

  A hotel fire would effectively empty each of the rooms rented nightly of all of their living inhabitants, at least temporarily. Whether or not one survives such a debacle, given the alarm-level of the fire, depends on escape routes, varied depths of sleep (assuming it is at night, when most alarms are set to yowling), alarm effectiveness, how much one longs for life/love/etc., foreign sign recognition (given location), and other varied factors. Most cases of hotel fire, though, simply account for disruption within a space that already provides a readymade rift between a person and his or her living patterns. In the case of how to survive a hotel fire by Angela Veronica Wong, the speaker in many of the poems is someone who seems inordinately comfortable with the psychological space provided by hotels—she seems to be a near-permanent inhabitant of a location that's fused to the notion of distance and impermanence and loss. To her, these things are facts which aren't imbued with excessive sentimentality and that is a huge plus.
  Early in the second section the speaker states:

  Every time I feel I've lost something I
  throw plants over my balcony. I don't
  watch just listen as they hit the sidewalk
  below. (15)

  showing this feeling of loss being compounded by a loss the speaker creates - she tosses a living thing out and awaits the sonic repercussions. But that is only if the lines are read as sentences building a story, and fortunately this is and isn't storybook. Wong's linebreaks are well wrought. And here, if we take the lines on their own the speaker is losing herself, losing the 'I' each time she feels she loses 'something.'
  This is love, not love, this is anything. And we don't need to know what it is exactly, just that she feels she's lost (both "it," and herself). In the second line the speaker throws plants over her balcony and refuses the action almost immediately, taking into account the full stop of the period. She then gestures to the reader to "watch" by joining her as she listens to the smack of the plant on the sidewalk. And if we read that line as instructive, it shifts us from the hypothetical and routine into the immediate here and now of a plant explosion. This is a template of sorts for the work Wong's lines can do throughout the book. She relies on plain-spoken language more often than not and the narrative unravels into more than its neat contents removed and placed before us, as if from a suitcase. It is in this second section where we get to witness the compounding acts the author takes to deepen our grasp of the speaker. After defining "sundering" on p.22, we see her:

  I show up in a leotard and pink shorts
  and bring a suitcase full of water. (23)

  The suitcase is a useless thing, but it's full of what we're mostly made of and it can fight most fires well, a vessel for putting out.
  The first and final sections consist of single poems. The first section establishes the longing that folds and morphs and transforms the seemingly steady "I" inhabiting this book. There is an other in this piece who's absent and valued, remembered precisely because of that absence. It makes some sense to me that this collection comes after Wong's PSA award-winning chapbook Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter, a book full of serially titled poems framed around the notion of the Dear John letter. The fire that exists in this book is one that may have started there. One stoked by coming back to it again and again, like memory. The final section is a very underwhelming fairy-tale - and intentionally so. It undercuts the notion of the romantic ideal that much of the book grapples with and in choosing the fairy-tale form does so within the genre that has helped to build so many wildly destructive expectations around the finding of the perfect other. In Wong's version, the princess's outcome hinges on her knowledge of others' use of chopsticks for eating rice - an act that is self-sustaining and decidedly unmagical.
  What the author turns to in the third section yields a bit less and it feels less habitable than the rest of the book. Wong builds distance by switching to third person and relying on center-aligned poems (not that there's anything wrong with that, just less visually appealing than the blocks and lineation she'd used in the previous and subsequent sections). The material here is dampened for me by the mythic tone struck in the titles, though this might well be prepping the reader for the turn at the end of the book. The intention here seems to be in keeping with the character/speaker, but while traversing the arc of an ill-fated relationship inhabited by "she" and "he" it feels like the author is almost too aware of the moving pieces and what routes they're supposed to travel. Here Wong does manage to capture people's damp intentions and the implied physical and emotional distance associated with well-maintained and easily transportable/transposable props and people. It may just be the fact that these pieces are the most literally narrative out of the entire book and the most startling stuff seems to happen when the author is busy with subversion.
  Serving as a direct counter-balance to the third section, the fourth is the most image-laden and sleep-addled, it is also the most violent. Aptly, given the content, it seems like we've stepped down into the speaker's subconscious here. And with that move, Wong has returned to the block-text form. It also appears that when most constrained by physical space and formal limitation—often, in this collection, at least—her poems become more acrobatic. Or it could be that the physical compression of the form that she's chosen makes the leaps more apparent. In any case, this section creates space for the reader. The world here accretes rather than being wholly handed over.
  The title section is full of poems steeped in the body. This series is outwardly the most sexual of the collection, though I'm uncertain about whether or not it is the sexiest - a move the author notes in an interview earlier this year in Coldfront where she describes her first collection of poems, "...As loud as they are, and as brash, and self-deprecating and maybe even amusing, are about vulnerability almost more than they are a fuck you for not loving/wanting/needing me. They're about the bruising that leads to the bravado." And we see this bravado most clearly in this series of poems.
  Throughout the book both the narrator (an assumed stand-in for the speaker in the third and final sections) and the speaker rely on plainly spoken statements, and often simple sentence construction, but how these seemingly straightforward narrative structures are strung together decidedly alters their impact. As a reader, I'm much more drawn to the moments where the logical connections are less apparent—for instance, among the title series there is a plainly spoken meditation on pornography on page 83. This piece does bear some humor in its directness and the fact that it deals with presumptions around porn, it seems to serve more as a bridge between what comes before it and what follows, with both of those pieces contain more startling images and less strict linearity of thought.
  While there are some less arresting pieces throughout the collection, the majority of the book contains material that will catch you up in its smolder and sway. The sections, on their own, are very well crafted and feel like separate rooms that we're being shown - where we can pick things up and test the walls. The book almost calls for a linear read-through so we get a proper view of all of the exits. Reading it this way provides rewarding accumulation, both in terms of understanding the author's craft as well as the headspace of the speaker. Throughout, format and layout are wed to the content in a way that really makes this book feel cohesive and whole. It is a well constructed building and something very good to hold, something that will withstand the fire it contains and something that yields more and more of itself upon return readings. If I were splitting up with a fire and had to grab a handful of things to cart with me, this book would definitely not be something I'd want to let burn.

• Coldfront
  http://coldfrontmag.com/snapshot-angela-veronica-wong/
  Word count: 1865

  Snapshot: Angela Veronica Wong
  features, interviews | Friday, July 20th, 2012

  SK: Congrats on your first book, how to survive a hotel fire. How did this book come about? Did you have a variety of poems that you collected over the years or did you have this particular book already in mind and wrote poems towards it?

  AVW: I wrote the majority of the manuscript in a whirlwind few months between February 2012 and June 2012 (the exception is the first poem of the book, which I had written in the fall of 2011), and I did not have this manuscript in mind at all before writing it. The first group of poems I wrote were the “HOTEL FIRE” poems, but I knew even as I was writing them that the HF poems could potentially be a chapbook, but not a full manuscript. I knew that the HF poems didn’t possess the dimensionality I wanted in a full-length book.

  The other sections were all written as self-contained pieces, as in, once I started to write them, I knew they would be a series sharing certain formal qualities or themes. I didn’t know that they would all fit into one manuscript together, but I hope that if you read the book, you’ll feel like every poem is necessary to its section, and to the book, and every section is necessary to each of the other sections within the book.

  I wanted a sense of continuity in the book that spans the separate sections, a feeling that the poems of the book belonged together, which is why images and languages are repeated, as if the sections are variations on a theme. I think having written most of the poems in a short amount of time allowed for this to be natural and unforced.

  SK: Your book on one level seems to be very much about “surviving” yet the poems themselves offer no practical advice or assistance in this endeavor. Can you talk a little bit about this section of the book and also touch upon the importance of hotels or a “fixed place” for this book?

  AVW: You mean the “HOW TO SURVIVE A HOTEL FIRE” section, right?

  SK: Correct.

  AVW: The idea of writing the “HOTEL FIRE” poems came out of something more like an exercise. It was just something to do – write poems entitled “HOW TO SURVIVE A HOTEL FIRE.” It certainly wasn’t an intellectual or particularly artistic project when I first thought to write them.

  What they became was a means through which I could investigate the disconnect between human beings, an emotional emptiness and the way we construct and protect ourselves against disappointment. And how inevitably the construction and protection fails because for the most part, we want to connect. There was something about having a manual on “how to survive” that really caught inside me. The starkness of that reality is wonderful, if on a somewhat dark premise, the idea that if we follow certain steps, we will survive. Pre-emptive disaster manuals prepare us to act smartly in the face of disaster. But our hearts are kind-of a disaster, and no amount of 1980s and 1990s R&B hits (Whitney Houston’s “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” anyone? I still maintain that “if somebody loves you/ won’t they always love you” is one of the darkest questions ever posed in a pop song) can prepare us for that. We do foolish things and make foolish decisions on our search to love someone. Which is in no way a caution against loving someone, but the HOTEL FIRE poems (though not whole book), are about that. As loud as they are, and as brash, and self-deprecating and maybe even amusing, are about vulnerability almost more than they are a fuck you for not loving/wanting/needing me. They’re about the bruising that leads to the bravado.

  And yes, I think “hotel” as location is certainly interesting. I totally was going to call “hotel” a liminal space and then I wanted to shoot myself, so I’ll just say that I find “hotel” to be interesting in its ambiguity, how it exists in a space between “home” and “away,” “ours” and “not ours.” This shifting space allows for shifting selves, like who we are within the context of “hotel” is different than who we are within the context of “home.” And it’s interesting to think about what happens when our selves are fluid.

  I’ve never actually thought of “fixed place” that much within my writing while I was writing until recently, only after people pointed out how much New York plays a role in them. And maybe as a result of that, the newer poems I’ve been writing actively engage with this crazy wonderful heartbreaking city. But I think it’s more that my poems are engage in place because I am informed greatly by where I am physically, and the sort of sensory stimulation that happens when you are part of the world. I was traveling quite a bit when I wrote hotel fire, so certainly all of those travel experiences are in the poems of the book, though they aren’t really named so I don’t know how obvious it is to others. And perhaps because I was feeling so transient, both physically and emotionally, while writing hotel fire, that feeling of transience, that feeling of uncertainty, is really how “place” intersects with the book.

  SK: Both Coconut the journal and the press are beloved by many. After taking a hiatus, the press is back full force; it must be exhilarating to be a part of the next wave of Coconut authors. Many poets struggle to find a home for their first books; did you enter a contest? Or if not, how did you find a home with Coconut.

  AVW: It’s definitely an honor to be part of Coconut! I was really fortunate—I met Bruce Covey, the editor of Coconut Books, at AWP in 2012. A couple of months later, he sent me an email saying that he had enjoyed my chapbooks (the ones on Cy Gist and Flying Guillotine) and asked if I’d be interested in sending him a manuscript. I sent him over a manuscript, and heard back in the summer that he was interested in publishing it.

  Bruce is truly wonderful to work with, and I feel so lucky to have him as the editor of my first book.

  SK: Since the unofficial and official release of the book, you’ve managed to do quite a few readings. Where have been so far? Any upcoming readings planned?

  It’s been fun reading in support of hotel fire but also in support of our collaborative chapbook, Steven! Which has really been the focus of most of my readings this past spring, and has taken us both through D.C. (In Your Ear Reading Series) and Philadelphia (General Idea Reading Series) and NYC (Southern Writers Reading Series).

  Upcoming readings are in NYC – including the New York Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island in July (I’m reading on Sunday), the Boog City Festival in August and a reading and panel in September. I’m scheduled to be in Atlanta in October with a group of awesome Coconut authors. Kate Schapira has kindly extended an invitation to me to read in Providence, which I believe will be happening in early December. I’m a Texas girl, born and raised, and I love a good road trip – if there are reading series looking to fill up spots, give a holler.*

  SK: You have also recently had your chapbook Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter published by Poetry Society of America. Looking at this chapbook, your full length, and having read some of your new “Elsa” poems, it seems like you are drawn to serial poems. Can you talk a bit about this?

  AVW: It’s either that I have no self-control, and can’t stop myself at just one poem, or I have major control issues, and need to keep explaining, and keep explaining. Serial poems allow me to burrow into my dark, dark obsessions, to live in them, to consume and be consumed by them, to let the obsession manifest into an engorged monster and explode to the point of vomiting. Gross.

  But each of the projects you mentioned, I think I was using the serial poem in a different way, though in all three to address a progression of emotion and all three being some sort of obsessive meditation on love, loving, loss, absence, and heartbreak. For the Dear Johnny poems, I was writing love letters, and I was interested in the form of the love letter, and the presentation and action of loving through the love letter, how to communicate the self through a letter, and how to learn about someone through correspondence. I think I also used the multiple poems as a way to create setting – the Dear Johnny poems are written toward a World War II soldier, so there is language and imagery that hopefully can evoke that setting.

  The nature of the serial poems in hotel fire depend on the series (sidenote explanation: the collection consists of six parts, four of which are a series of poems, the opening and ending sections consisting only of one single piece), but I think fundamentally they are all about being a human being who is trying to connect with (an)other human being(s) and how beautiful and how scary that is, even if and when it is fracturing.

  For the new Elsa poems, along with the emotionality and explicit rawness that is hopefully the present, driving force in the poems, I also want to use the serial nature of the poems to investigate narrative and character development, as well as the divide, or lack of a divide, between author, poetic persona, and character. Like the Dear Johnny poems, there is a historical inspiration to Elsa, so writing several poems allows for more “information” to be sprinkled throughout, and more “history” to support the poems.

  SK: What’s next or what are you currently working on?

  AVW: Mostly just Elsa right now. I have been working on what can only become a spectacular collaboration of poems with Amy Lawless. I’m psyched to be part of Niina Pollari and Judy Berman’s “It’s Complicated” anthology, in which feminist writers discuss loving problematic, potentially misogynistic art. http://itscomplicatedproject.tumblr.com/ I’m hoping to do more collaborations outside of poetry. Everything is open and everything is exciting!

  *If you are interested in having Angela Veronica Wong read for your series or University please contact through her webpage- www.angelaveronicawong.com.

  Read more another interview with Angela Veronica Wong at the Poet Hound.

  Interview conducted by Steven Karl.