Ally Ang

“This latest shiny new catastrophe”, Ally Ang declares in their poem “You Deserve the World," “is not the first apocalypse we have survived/The world has ended before/and before and before.” And indeed, their poems patiently “practice” that long-game cosmology, building the world anew “in the lines of poems,” allowing the turns to “water/… similes, wait for them/to overtake the front lawn” with a verdant “volatile/rhythm of unrepentant rapture.” “Not queer like a rainbow slapped/onto a Wells Fargo debit card, gay as in/let’s hurl a Molotov cocktail thru the window of the bank at nightfall and kiss while we watch/the glass shatter” in an endless transformation “we dance like the empire is dying/water the ground where it once stood/and watch what blooms/lush and verdant/in its wake.”