Planetaria: Visual Poetry

Planetaria is a groundbreaking collection of visual poetry that remaps the cosmos through a feminist, diasporic lens. Emerging from Monica Ong’s acclaimed exhibition at the Poetry Foundation back in 2022, the book transforms classic astronomical instruments, such as volvelles and planispheres, into poetic mechanisms that explore erasure, visibility, and the role of women in science and mythology. Ong has carefully woven Chinese star charts, scientific illustrations, and her own family photographs with lyrical text, inviting the reader to uncover hidden narratives and challenge the star lore borne of patriarchy and imperialism. In the book’s introduction, John Yau writes, “Scientifically minded, which is to say a pursuer of truths, Ong’s work is not about superstition, but the long shadows such beliefs cast over time. Discovering the different ways culture has defined the space between the truth-seeking individual and the indifferent universe, she re-envisions that gap.”

Planetaria expands the boundaries of what poetry can be, fusing language, image, and object into a multisensory experience. Readers are not just observers but explorers, navigating rotating poems and lunar diagrams that map narratives often left out of the stars. Luminous, intimate, and insurgent, Ong’s work is a celestial atlas for our time, and nothing short of a triumph.

“To notice is to hold the self open
wholly as a grail
steady as a brush
in silken sweeps across soft
veils of valerian sky.”