BOOKS & MEDIA

“To dream in oceans of stories, listening to echoes from rituals, ancient and new.”

Poet Nellie Wong celebrates her ninetieth birthday with a specially curated book of poetry, exploring themes of family, art, activism and aging.

Marking her 50th anniversary as a published poet, Nothing Like Freedom is Nellie Wong’s fifth collection of poetry, following Breakfast Lunch Dinner (2012), Stolen Moments (1997), Death of Long Steam Lady (1986), and Dreams of Harrison Railroad Park (1977).

“As she marks her 90^th birthday, the poet and activist Nellie Wong has given us a gift: a new collection of poems that bridges the decades of her remarkable career, with work that spans the 1970s to the present. In Nothing Like Freedom, Wong shares with us a lifetime of memories.”

— TIMOTHY YU, Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Like the food in them— and there is plenty of it in Nellie Wong’s poetry to satisfy the needs and cravings of the body, mind and spirit—the poems in this collection are nourishing, sensual, essential and thoroughly satisfying. Together they paint a picture of city life at once ordinary and extra-ordinary, where family is as old and sustaining as poetry and music, and joy and activism are integral parts of daily activity. Brava!” — Lucha Corpi

“Nellie Wong’s poems are personal and political. The immediate and everyday – a secretary’s fingers on the keyboard, a San Francisco streetcar’s roar, an allergic reaction – evoke compassion and an unself-conscious desire for social justice that seem as necessary and natural as appetite or breath.” — Sondra Zeidenstein

*The poems in this now out-of-print chapbook can be found within The Crimson Edge: Older Women Writing, Vol. 2, published by Chicory Blue Press, 2000. ISBN-13: 978-1887344067.

“Nellie Wong’s new text fuses a stark historical landscape with the deep passion for life that emerges from generations of cultural wisdom and generations of suffering; wields force in the new literary contour taking form in the West Coast: glowing, tender and jade-stone real. . . .” —Juan Felipe Herrera

”Nellie Wong is ‘Lai Oy,’ a Chinese American coming to grips with her ancestors’ heritage, symbolized by images of “gold bracelets and opal rings” and “stuffed bitter melons on a platter of dragons and clouds.” Ms. Wong feels deeply and writes expressively… her poems flow and her thoughts provoke.” — Judy Yung