Overview

Light Year by Jennifer Wong is a meditation on time. These poems delve into the mind of a poet crossing spaces of deep wounds, love and healing: a constellation of friendships and love as she moves through upheaval, transformation and change. The collection offers glimpses into the journeys of a migrant, a daughter, and a mother; with the passage of years, the poems ask what it might mean to move like light itself, beyond expectations and into new ways of understanding ourselves more profoundly. With sublime precision, Jennifer Wong’s poetry brings clarity to the spaces between the stars – the time difference between memories and place, between our loved ones, and everything we hold dear in life. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

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9781916760325

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Reviews

‘Jennifer Wong’s dazzling collection maps a constellation of memory and generational inheritance with language that is both spare and luminous. From star factories to Golden Bauhinia Square, these poems assemble the fractured histories of Hong Kong and China while untying deeper knots of collective trauma. Crossing thresholds between the past and the imagined, Light Year reveals the fragility of what we inherit and the resilience found in re-telling it. History repeats, refracts, and reshapes itself—yet in Wong’s hands, it becomes radiant.’ -- Denise Saul 'These poems map the echoing distances between interplanetary bodies, between moment and memory, between home and homeland, between two figures reaching across time and space. With the effortless precision of falling snow, they limn the contours of negative space and negative capability, rendering forms both ephemeral and indelible, both delicate and inevitable.' -- Monica Youn

‘Jennifer Wong’s dazzling collection maps a constellation of memory and generational inheritance with language that is both spare and luminous. From star factories to Golden Bauhinia Square, these poems assemble the fractured histories of Hong Kong and China while untying deeper knots of collective trauma. Crossing thresholds between the past and the imagined, Light Year reveals the fragility of what we inherit and the resilience found in re-telling it. History repeats, refracts, and reshapes itself—yet in Wong’s hands, it becomes radiant.’ -- Denise Saul 'These poems map the echoing distances between interplanetary bodies, between moment and memory, between home and homeland, between two figures reaching across time and space. With the effortless precision of falling snow, they limn the contours of negative space and negative capability, rendering forms both ephemeral and indelible, both delicate and inevitable.' -- Monica Youn ‘From the galactic to the diasporic, Light Year traverses vast expanses of language, memory, and unforgettable intimacy. Skillful and graceful across a range of forms, Jennifer Wong’s unwavering strength as a poet is her undeniable imagery, at once sharply observant and softly holding of the reader’s attention. This is a poet who wants us to do more than see—witness, these poems say, and linger, and wonder.’ -- Chen Chen ‘In Light Year, Jennifer Wong writes across vast distances — between stars and cities, mothers and daughters, past and present — with a luminous, intimate grace. These poems carry memory and exile the way light does: delicate, enduring, and still reaching us long after everything else has gone dark.’ -- Romalyn Ante

‘Jennifer Wong’s dazzling collection maps a constellation of memory and generational inheritance with language that is both spare and luminous. From star factories to Golden Bauhinia Square, these poems assemble the fractured histories of Hong Kong and China while untying deeper knots of collective trauma. Crossing thresholds between the past and the imagined, Light Year reveals the fragility of what we inherit and the resilience found in re-telling it. History repeats, refracts, and reshapes itself—yet in Wong’s hands, it becomes radiant.’ -- Denise Saul

Author Information

Jennifer Wong is a Hong Kong-born poet who lives in the UK. She studied English at Oxford and has an MA and PhD in creative writing from University of East Anglia and Oxford Brookes. She has three collections including Letters Home (Nine Arches Press). She is the co-editor of State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation (Outspoken Press, 2023) and Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve, 2023). She is also the author of Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere (Bloomsbury, 2023).

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