"About the Work" with Stella Wong

In our "About the Work" series, Natalie Tombasco asks recent contributors for insight into their writing or for current sources of inspiration. Read Stella Wong's poems "[who are you]" and "[i am collecting]" in SER Vol. 40.2.

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“[i am collecting]” was influenced by Wong Kar-wai’s film In the Mood for Love. My favorite scenes were when characters were squeezing through the tight hallways of Hong Kong apartments as they were moving in and out—their hairstyles and qipaos stayed with me long after the movie ended. I wondered what it meant for women to have access to and feel intimacy in such spaces, what kind of consent and conformity was required of them. These long dashes and prose forms are, in a way, thinking about lines themselves becoming long strands of hair.

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STELLA WONG is the author of Spooks, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, which was selected for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize by Danez Smith. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her poems have appeared in POETRY, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

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