Let the Moon Wobble by Ally Ang

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Ally Ang begins their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble, with an invocation—one I’ll quote at length because a spell should always be read in full:

 

          Let the moon wobble.

          Let the basil plant flower.

          Let the poets discombobulate.

          Let the verbs noun. Let the nouns verb.

          Let the grief howl.

          Let the emails unread.

          Let the land speak.

          Let the oceans revenge.

          Let the people free. Let

          the people free.

 

And so we are set free into the pages of an unfolding howl—a spell for the end of the world. One for wildness, queerness, and freedom. So too are each of the poems in Let the Moon Wobble, a collection that acutely captures the grief and brutality of our current late-stage capitalist nightmare, yet is still abundant with joy, pleasure, and imagination.

 

Broken into three sections, Ang spends Part I touring a variety of selves, each navigating the absurdity of our current spectacle. Their speakers muse on whether or not ghosts have capitalism too while visiting their grandfather’s grave and muddle through the very end of depressing grey winters—”I take the mountains / for granted, let my calls / go to voicemail, my heart / hollowing like canned / sitcom laughter.”

 

At times, Ang even channels a kind of Choi Seungja-like ferocity, recalling Seungja’s explorations of self-hatred and alienation with biting, heart-wrenching lines like: “Before I was a girl, I was an accusation. A bad / omen. A piece of gum stuck to the bottom / of my mother’s boot."

 

But despite their brutal (but accurate) assessment of contemporary Western life and the way our selves and our world are ravaged by it, Ang never lingers in this despair. They play with it, alchemize it, refusing to let it dominate the speakers of the poems, often by way of, ironically, form and constraint. Ang’s playful exploration of form throughout is an especially bright spot in the collection. 

 

A highlight is RISK ASSESSMENT, a poem structured as a mental health intake questionnaire. The dry, bureaucratic questions (“Have you had thoughts of hurting yourself or others?”) collide with a raw, tragically romantic voice in the answers:

 

          I knuckle the knots / out of my creaky back /

          harden my flesh to marble / and swallow

          the cracked shards of myself / that I have

          meticulously chiseled away

 

Ang continues to explore form with UPDATES REGARDING [  ], a hauntingly corporate, dystopian form email a la early COVID-19 (these unprecedented times…)

 

          Dear [blistering moonlight slivered by blinds] [fruit fly circling an overripe

          banana] [succulent sickly with overwatering],

 

          I hope this email finds you [stuffing your cavernous pit with the best garbage

          money can buy] [salting the earth with toothless anger] [snarling and

          snapping over scraps].

 

This imaginative use of form gathers momentum in Part II. THE TRUTH IS, a poem written in the form of a multiple-choice quiz that leaves us investigating the truth of our own memories without an answer key.

 

          3. Which version of the story is closest

          to the truth?

                    a. I was so lonely, I would have let anyone

                    touch me

                    b. I was shrouded in loneliness so thick

                    that it was impossible to touch me

                    c. I was born already fearful

                                                            of touch

 

In AUTOEROTIC ABECEDARIAN, we are treated to, well, just what it says on the tin, an autoerotic abcedarian—a poem so deceptively fluid and sensual, we forget we are bound by such rigid structure at all:

 

          Tired of all these selfish lovers, I

          undulate my hips under my

          voracious hand, wet and shining

          with want, unfurling like a

          xeranthemum inside me. Shame,

          you unwelcome god, at the

          zenith of my pleasure, you are there.

 

Ang even gifts us with a pantoum, adroitly constructing the complex tower of repeating lines, in POST-OPERATIVE CARE, and later a late summer ghazal, a love letter to the natural world we are so rapidly losing. 

 

The crown jewel of this collection of structural and formal experiments, however, is HEARTBREAK MAD LIBS, a poem structured in the style of a class Mad Libs game, and inspired by Angbee Saleems’s poem “Poem Mad Lib for the Apocalypse.” Here, not only are we given a tour of the speaker’s own heartbreak, but are also invited to tour our own.

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Ang’s interest in interactivity in their poems feels deeply magical and connective, and offers a kind of earnest welcome to the reader into the world of their poems.

 

If Ang’s love of form defines Part II, their willingness to unflinchingly explore the most untamed and joyful moments of life defines Part III. Pleasure, sexuality, and revolutionary queer love are all examined here.

 

Black feminist writer, organizer, and activist Toni Cade Bambara said, “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible,” and Ang heard her loud and clear. They have a gift for filling readers with the charged spirit of revolution without ever sugarcoating the violence freedom demands. But above all, love serves as the lodestar of these revolutionary visions. Even in their sharply bleak (and often darkly funny) portrayal of modern life under capitalism, Ang keeps turning us gently by the shoulders, poem by poem, towards scenes of queer joy and ungovernable freedom.

 

In NOT GAY AS IN HAPPY, we romp through a poem that shouts a defiant, colorful, bubble-lettered, libidinous prayer for a queer future:

 

          I’m as flamboyant as a flamingo

          and as buoyant as a bumblebee blowing

          bubbles behind a bounce house.

 

and 

 

          I’m partnering with the freaks and the fairies

          to strike fear into the hearts of fascists. Let’s

          untether our shame and toss it in the dumpster,

          let’s shout this prayer so loud our lungs

          collapse

 

In FRUIT ETUDES, Ang reinforces another particularly refreshing element of their poetics—sincerity. 

Ally Ang is simply not interested in your cynicism and invulnerability. They embrace the poetic truth of the moon; they are unafraid to invoke the symbolic power of the rose; they stick their tongue out at anyone who finds the memory of a mango too sentimental. 

 

          The world doesn’t need more

          mango diaspora poetry, proclaims

          a viral tweet. I hit the block button.

          Dear mango, my sweetest childhood

          friend, my most sinless indulgence,

          you deserve every poem you get,

          including this one.

 

It is sentimental. Everything in Ang’s unsteady yet deeply hopeful world of romance and violence is—sentimental but never mawkish. There is a certain rich earnestness and ardor in these poems that a reader cannot help but feel stirred and breathless at times. Ang carries this momentum into the longest poem in the collection, an unabashed love poem, POEM BEGINNING WITH YOU AND ENDING WITH EVERYTHING. 

 

          Let me revel in the excess, ecstasy,

          echo, expanse, romance, fervor,

          horror, pleasure, prayer, play,

          swell, spill, shine, divine, thrill,

          heat, wet, want, mess, miraculous,

          nameless, vivid, agonizing everything.

 

During this final invocation, a moment of frenzy when we feel the agonizing everything, when we witness the wobbling moon, we might wonder what to do in the face of all this destabilization.  

 

Luckily, Ally Ang has the answer: “We dance like the empire is dying.”