Silent Anatomies

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More About This Title Silent Anatomies

English

Monica Ong investigates cultural silences that shape the medical-emotional landscape of family diaspora, extending from China to the Philippines and North America. Her collection of image-poems juxtaposes diagram and diary, bearing witness to underrepresented histories of the body. Created as an assemblage of poetry, archive, and medical ephemera, it unpacks silence not only as the absence of language, but also as historical erasure, the loss of cultural memory, reconstructed truths, and ghosted identities. Writing in the voice of Medica, a daughter and witness, Ong questions the social hierarchies and gender roles of her upbringing, particularly their impact on women’s health-seeking habits across generations. X-ray scans and anatomical drawings are rewritten to map identity and elegy, taking us to emotional landscapes in otherwise clinical spaces. Another series of apothecary bottles seeks to remedy anxieties about gender, race, and even mental illness, drawing from a fusion of multicultural folklore and belief. With this experimental debut, Ong invites readers into her complex lineage, much of it fading, with the remains collected here as documentation of nomadic heritage, resilience, and quiet devotion.

English

Monica Ong is a poet, a Kundiman poetry fellow, and a visual artist whose work has been published in Drunken Boat, Glassworks magazine, Seneca Review, and Tidal Basin Review. She lives in Trumbull, Connecticut. Joy Harjo is an award-winning poet, a musician, and an author. She is considered an important figure in the second wave of the Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. Her poetry collections include In Mad Love and War, A Map to the Next World, Secrets from the Center of the World, She Had Some Horses, and The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.

English

"In lush visual assemblages and poems that are ironic and moving, Ong delves into the often-silent selves that every self carries. . . the figures of her Chinese and Filipino backgrounds, the ghosts and demons of familial and cultural history, and the present American self grappling with race and identity. . . . This book is as ambitious and thrilling as they come."  —Rick Barot, poetry editor, New England Review
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