Planetaria: Visual Poetry and the Asian-American Avant Garde

Join us on Thursday, September 18, 2025 at 7:00pm for a special evening with visual poet Monica Ong, who will present a multi-media poetry reading from her new collection Planetaria, followed by a conversation with poet and scholar Timothy Yu, professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the foremost experts of the Asian-American avant-garde. Enjoy an exploration of the experimental impulse of visual poetry and how the ghosts of Chinese star histories and family diaspora meet us on this crossroad of art and literature.

Rewriting the sky from a female perspective, Monica Ong invites readers into the intimate cosmology of Planetaria with poems that utilize the visual language of astronomy to explore the precarious territories of motherhood, women in science, and diaspora identity, while navigating the complex landscape of the Chinese night sky. With a foreword by poet and art critic John Yau, these poems move through constellations, across ancestral skies, turning wide-eyed insomnia into nocturnes in search of home.

Presented as an immersive poetry reading and cultural conversation, this event is friendly for all ages and offers audience development for lovers of contemporary poetry, astronomy, letterpress and graphic design, art and science crossovers, women’s history, Asian American experience, and visual poetics.

Monica Ong

Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. You can find some of her work in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine. Ong’s astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria. Her fine press editions and literary art objects reside in over fifty institutional collections worldwide. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow.

Timothy Yu

Timothy Yu is Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the poetry collection 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press), the Editor’s Selection in the 2014 NOS Book Contest. He is also the author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford University Press), which won the Book Award in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press), and he also serves as executive editor of the journal Contemporary Literature.

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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.

CALENDAR

Planetaria: Visual Poetry and the Asian-American Avant Garde

Monica Ong

Timothy Yu

PLAN YOUR VISIT

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