Ally Ang sparks up this city with a distinctively queer, raucous energy that’s nerdy, enthusiastic, genuine, and joyful. “Reading a really good book of poems is so exhilarating,” Ang told me, when I spoke with them around the release of their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble. “I get hype off of it. It feels like downing cold brew or something. It makes me feel so, just, like, alive. Nothing else gives me that feeling. I'm so addicted to the feeling of reading really exciting poetry.” by Katie Lee Ellison Ally Ang sparks up this city with a distinctively queer, raucous energy that’s nerdy, enthusiastic, genuine, and joyful. “Reading a really good book of poems is so exhilarating,” Ang told me, when I spoke with them around the release of their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble. “I get hype off of it. It feels like downing cold brew or something. It makes me feel so, just, like, alive. Nothing else gives me that feeling. I'm so addicted to the feeling of reading really exciting poetry.”  I don’t know about you, but I haven’t felt anywhere near this excited about much lately, which is another reason why Ang is a beacon in Seattle. Bestowed with the honor of an NEA grant in 2023, they shot into a wider collective public consciousness, but as they’ll tell you themselves, they’ve been publishing poems in zines and anywhere else that would have them for 12 years and counting. This seemingly sudden arrival to the poetry scene with their debut collection was in fact built from years of work with mentors, studying craft, and honing their voice.  In fact, “the earliest poem of the book was written in 2018, and most of them were written from 2019 through 2022,” Ang said. The collection has “undergone somewhere between 10 and 100 revisions.” You could say they learned to write through the creation of this book. “I used to be a little bit anti-form, because I was like, oh, poetry shouldn't have rules. After reading a lot more poems, and reading a lot more poets who work really heavily with form, I began to see that it opened up a lot of possibilities, as opposed to being restrictive. My relationship with form has evolved, and I have a lot of fun with it now.” And there is more to come. “I am working on something that will hopefully be a second book someday,” said Ang. “But right now it's just a bunch of poems in a Google Doc. What I'm thinking through in the new project is gender as a form, and how queerness is breaking that form and recreating it.”  What stands out most from our conversation is the idea that no art is made in a vacuum. It’s collective care and exchange—that comes in so many forms—that allowed this work to bubble up to our communal surface.  “A lot of people in Seattle, like Jane Wong and Luther Hughes and Cass Garrison, they're all influences to me,” said Ang. “Even though I also just see them around.” They also mentioned a Yin Yi workshop through Oneworld Publications that got them focused; their friend Serena Brown, whom they hired to help with order and structure; and South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, whose grotesque, feminist work “gave me permission to lean into the more disgusting and gooey aspects of being a person and having a body.” Ang leans hard into that permission in Let the Moon Wobble to explore the complexities of queer sex, alongside the gross weirdness of having a body at all. Inherent in these pages is a resistance to the kind of domesticated queerness Ellen DeGeneres made popular.  “There is this narrative that once you come out as queer and embrace your identity,” said Ang, “then you let go of all your internalized whatever, and just be proud all the time. That has certainly not been the experience for me. I am obviously very proud of my identities, and I feel pretty comfortable in who I am, but the lifetimes of shame that have accumulated in me are something that I don't know if I'll ever be done with. Even in moments of pleasure, intimacy, and ecstasy, that shame is also always present. Instead of trying to be like, ‘hashtag it gets better,’ it was important for me to be like, well, you know what, all of this is present: the pleasure and the shame and the disgust and the pride. It's all tangled up together.”  In their day job, Ang is a nonprofit fundraiser, and, when not writing, co-runs and cohosts a monthly reading series, Other People’s Poems, with Cody Stetzel at Open Books in Pioneer Square. People turn out, and the community built from this series is strong. And that’s the point. Ang is deeply invested in community, perhaps for reasons that stretch far beyond their own life.  “I don't think I'm going to be alive to see the downfall of capitalism, nor the rebuild of whatever [takes] its place. [But] we can take care of each other as our governments fail to take care of us. Like, people really do care about each other. The early days of the pandemic were actually the most optimistic I ever felt about the world, even though it was a really scary, uncertain time. People mobilized so quickly into mutual aid, taking care of each other, and creating pods. When the uprisings [after George Floyd’s murder] took place, people were training as street medics and doing jail support. I feel less optimistic than I did then because of how things have unfolded in the last five years. There's so much room for improvement, because so many people do fall through the cracks, and people who don't have strong networks of community don't tend to receive that care.” This conversation took place before the eruption of protest and action in Minneapolis against ICE, but their words are a breathing example of how politics are always personal.  Of their collection and the very deeply personal in it, Ang said, “It feels scary to talk about the suicidal ideation stuff, or feeling hopeless and despairing about the world. I wrote [those pieces] at a very different point in my life, and it is weird to have this book coming out at a time when I want to be here, I want to be alive. I like my life for the most part. I don't know if I'll read those poems aloud at readings, because I don't want to go back to that. But it's important that it's there, because it was real, and I think it's real for a lot of other people, too. Which is why I also wanted to put a lot of joy and hope in the book, and not just linger in that really despairing place.” In all of Ang’s energy and excitement about poetry, there is a wisdom and depth to the understanding that celebration is a necessary antidote to our losses and fuels our fight against the terrible, monstrous, murderous, sponsored, and authorized state-sanctioned violence across this country right now. We don’t know what’s coming, but Ang’s work is one way to prepare ourselves, one way to help keep ourselves and each other alive. ...read more read less