Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong
Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong
Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong works in many mediums: poetry, music, theater, performance, video and software. Born in Wisconsin and raised in Hong Kong, she lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for two decades before returning to Hong Kong to care for her mother. She can still be spotted in California from time to time, visiting her two children. the department of peace is Kwong’s third book of poetry, following The Quenching (Finishing Line Press) and ravel (Neopoesis Press). Renku.earth, an Elixir application she built for writing poetry collaboratively, was a runner-up for the 2024 Elixir Consultancy Prize from the consultancy firm Erlang Solutions.
the department of peace
In the department of peace, Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong invites us to a gathering of voices where each utterance matters. From sailors’ prayers to a mother’s songs to a lover’s last words, all lines render the contours of this poet’s extraordinary sensibility. Kwong’s poetry ventures into different languages and registers, time periods and places. In the words of playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, this book reflects “the inevitable practice of living” and “original inspiration.”
Book Reviews
Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong’s poems could be tattoos, bullets, shrapnel, coils, things that have escaped out of cannons and traded deadliness for the awareness that comes after loss—all this against the backdrops of sky and a Hong Kong–California quotidian.
—Judy Juanita, author of Gawdzilla
From the Foreword
With an unerring eye, [Wai-Lee Kwong] skillfully weaves together charged political critique, complex family experiences, and meditations on the natural world in poems that compel and reveal.
—Maw Shein Win, author of Percussing the Thinking Jar