how to survive a hotel fire
Alum, 2007 - Creative Writing at The New School
Coconut Books, 2012
“A princess starts a hotel fire. How to survive? Become a poet. Become Angela Veronica Wong. ‘How we remember is formed like glass,’ she writes. How we remember—survive and remember. ‘I placed a book upside down on your piano,’ the poet writes. It is this book, formed like music. Read it.”—Honor Moore
“Asphyxiation, falling plants, and abandoned buildings—this is just the beginning of Angela Veronica Wong’s debut collection which is both an exploration and a meditation of intimacy and its fracturing. Playing children ‘scream like death,’ there are ‘black cliffs’ and traces of mascara on pillowcases the day after. These poems embrace mythologies and enact fairy tales as a stand-in for disappointment and rejections. As the collection moves through scenes of domesticity and urban life, there’s a subtle shifting away (but never a complete departure) from youthful naïveté into a quiet violence and desperation of one who knows too much. HOW TO SURVIVE A HOTEL FIRE is our tender riot and slow sad swan song, as we lie awake watching an empty street fill with sleet.”—Steven Karl