Jennifer Wong, "Light Year" (Nine Arches Press, 2025)

Jennifer Wong’s poetry collection *Light Year* examines the intersection of personal history, silence, and the diasporic experience. Poetry serves as a malleable, condensed form for expressing grief and joy, often acting as a bridge across unspoken cultural and familial divides. The collection utilizes imagery—such as the sea and light filtering through trees—to navigate the complexities of motherhood and the feeling of being an outsider. Wong emphasizes that while pain often precedes the creative process, poetry provides a necessary space to articulate specific, lived experiences without relying on rigid labels. By blending personal memory with cinematic visual techniques, the poems transform individual struggles into universal reflections on identity, communication, and the limits of forgiveness.