Let The Moon Wobble by Ally Ang
Reviewed by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
When I say, You deserve the world,
what I mean is this is not the first apocalypse
we have survived. The world has ended before,
and before and before, and for some, there was
no after. We have watched its rind cracking open
like a freshly-broken heart, and each time
we build and rebuild.
-From "You Deserve The World"
From Earth, the moon only shows a singular face. One that, though it may shift, rarely allows onlookers to see all of its facets at once. We are left attempting to understand its waxing and waning by a mere piece of the moon. Yet, when images taken over an entire month are set side by side, it is said that the moon itself wobbles. It comes in and out of the light, rotating on its own axis, embracing it's full self. This phenomenon is what Ally Ang uses as a metaphor for the cycle of self-discovery and acceptance in their debut collection Let The Moon Wobble (Alice James Books, 2025).
Ally Ang is a poet and editor based in Seattle. Having received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and Artist Trust, Ally's work centers experiences from gay and Asian culture that are often dismissed. Ang's work has been published in Poets.org, The Rumpus, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Bettering American Poetry. Ang co-hosts Other People’s Poems, with Cody Stetzel, a poetry open mic and reading series at Open Books: A Poem Emporium in Seattle, Washington. Ang's newest collection, spread over three distinct sections, interrogates ideas of self and calls current politics into the light. Through odes to victims of police brutality, original found forms, and a conjuring and reclamation of nature itself, Ang shows us the speaker's cratered and nuanced sides, inviting us to look at all the places and practices we have forgotten in the shadows.
Ang's collection is divided into three distinct parts that slowly reveal many aspects of the speaker's self. Ang uses unexpected forms to mark this journey. Using found forms poems such as redacted emails, footnotes, and mental health intake questionnaires, Ang fashions new entry points to examine common themes of belonging, self-doubt and reclamation. In "Anti-Ode To Girlhood, " the speaker uses menstruation as the mark of coming into "girlhood," craving this defining moment:
Night after night, I placed
a tampon under my pillow in the hopes
that you would come to me, that someday,
I too might bleed.
However, quickly the speaker reveals that the arrival of this momentous event is more complicated than originally believed:
How could I have known
then what singular, monstrous thing you would make
of me?
The speaker explains that this natural occurrence will lead to many complications. While on one hand, they mark it as a point of arrival of self, it brings societal responsibilities that seem in contradiction to the speaker's true self. These include greater scrutiny and existing in a world that expects them to be a different person based on their gender- some of this often leading to oppression and violence.
However, the simple critiquing of gendered violence is too narrow a thesis for Ang. Instead, through subtlety and omission, Ang turns the spotlight on those who benefit from this violence as the real monsters. In the poem, "What doesn't kill me / Makes me," Ang uses black out to let the readers insert themselves into the poem:
The man on the bus calls me
A --------, the effort of his hatred
By omitting the most offensive remark, which is nodded as a slur word for homosexuals, Ang both avoids injuring the reader and lets the reader insert various meanings of hatred into this scene. This broadens the aperture of relatability and inclusion for the reader, letting us take our place in the speaker's shoes.
I don’t want to tell you what
he said next, how he screamed
at me and the other ------, the ways
he fantasized about our mutilation,
how the other men watched
and grinned like it was all a joke.
With scalpel-precision, Ang invites the reader into this scene of verbal violence by using the second-person "you." The speaker shows that the men don't just want to hurt them—the men enjoy hurting them, though who the "they" is is redacted, implying that any of us can be the victims of violence.
The second section of the collection is filled with questions fueled by these traumatic experiences. From a multiple choice test of memory's reliability to to a poem in the form of a pap smear process, the speaker dives into a more intimate look at why they have become who they are and how violence and experience has illuminated new parts of their waning side identity. But there is no clear answer to the violence or how to navigate it. Instead, the last poem of this section, the speaker emerges as the product of self-reclamation. No longer hiding in the shame of how the world has seen them, they begin to arrive at their full and glowing self through the acceptance of primal sexuality:
Something about forbidden
fruit, how the flesh gives beneath my fingertips,
makes me lick my lips with pleasure. My gorge rises
as I imagine tearing into the muscle and sinew
of raw pork belly, sucking the juice off the bone, bursting
with carnality.
This imagined bloodlust unlocks a rebellion in the speaker. While self-identifying as "a vegetarian", at an H mart, they abandon every expectation by "fingering the meats". They begin to eating the heads of fish and "pick[ing] the bones out of our teeth at the dinner table," the speaker makes a decision to abandon expectation- to be full and visible in ways they have only desired in private. And as "a thousand vacant eyes / Stare back at me, open-mouthed," the speaker chooses to continue to feast. They gut these expectations in the most public way. This act of reclamation of self serves as the turning point into the last section. Now, not bound by the limitations of others or the shifting cycle, the speaker gets to reveal their full self for all to see.
This final section opens with the poem "Owed to My Father's Accent." The title both nods to a traditional ode and a harkening to what the bloodline before us suffers for our freedoms. The speaker observes their father navigating space as part foreigner, part chameleon who follows the rules of blending in:
The way the plumber
shakes my father’s hand and says, I’ll call you
Bill instead. The way my teachers
refuse his gaze as they ask me
to translate his English into my own.
His calloused hands provide for his family and hold onto the respect of his child:
The same hands
that sold churros from a cart on the boardwalk.
Scrubbed grime out of a movie star’s
kitchen sink. Loaded boxes of frozen food
into an eighteen-wheeler truck by moonlight.
The same hands that never learned how to use
Chopsticks.
And while for some, watching their father struggle to use the chopsticks in a noodle house would feel like culture slipping through his fingers, for the speaker it is a place of connection. It reminds us that, in the smallest places we find ourselves, we hold on to who we are—we pass down culture and maintain legacy. Watching their father "bent over the bowl in reverence" reminds the speaker that the most natural act of rebellion is being one's truest self. So they and their father do not cut the noodles that signify long life. Instead, "[They] slurp them up / so loudly, the whole room / stops to look."
Ang's ability to impute light on the mundane and complicated nuances of life with equal gravitas are what make this collection a delight to read. The poems wax and wane out across the political and the personal with the grace of a shifting tide. While this world offers us gloom and despair, Ang shows that the world has ended a million times before, that we are not new to destruction or apocalypse. In fact, when we allow everything to fall apart, we can see our entirety in the moonlight and truly learn to rise, as the speaker does in the final poem of the book, "Hydra"
neck aching from the weight of myselves
I rise
leaving a trail of me in my wake.
what I mean is this is not the first apocalypse
we have survived. The world has ended before,
and before and before, and for some, there was
no after. We have watched its rind cracking open
like a freshly-broken heart, and each time
we build and rebuild.
-From "You Deserve The World"
From Earth, the moon only shows a singular face. One that, though it may shift, rarely allows onlookers to see all of its facets at once. We are left attempting to understand its waxing and waning by a mere piece of the moon. Yet, when images taken over an entire month are set side by side, it is said that the moon itself wobbles. It comes in and out of the light, rotating on its own axis, embracing it's full self. This phenomenon is what Ally Ang uses as a metaphor for the cycle of self-discovery and acceptance in their debut collection Let The Moon Wobble (Alice James Books, 2025).
Ally Ang is a poet and editor based in Seattle. Having received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and Artist Trust, Ally's work centers experiences from gay and Asian culture that are often dismissed. Ang's work has been published in Poets.org, The Rumpus, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Bettering American Poetry. Ang co-hosts Other People’s Poems, with Cody Stetzel, a poetry open mic and reading series at Open Books: A Poem Emporium in Seattle, Washington. Ang's newest collection, spread over three distinct sections, interrogates ideas of self and calls current politics into the light. Through odes to victims of police brutality, original found forms, and a conjuring and reclamation of nature itself, Ang shows us the speaker's cratered and nuanced sides, inviting us to look at all the places and practices we have forgotten in the shadows.
Ang's collection is divided into three distinct parts that slowly reveal many aspects of the speaker's self. Ang uses unexpected forms to mark this journey. Using found forms poems such as redacted emails, footnotes, and mental health intake questionnaires, Ang fashions new entry points to examine common themes of belonging, self-doubt and reclamation. In "Anti-Ode To Girlhood, " the speaker uses menstruation as the mark of coming into "girlhood," craving this defining moment:
Night after night, I placed
a tampon under my pillow in the hopes
that you would come to me, that someday,
I too might bleed.
However, quickly the speaker reveals that the arrival of this momentous event is more complicated than originally believed:
How could I have known
then what singular, monstrous thing you would make
of me?
The speaker explains that this natural occurrence will lead to many complications. While on one hand, they mark it as a point of arrival of self, it brings societal responsibilities that seem in contradiction to the speaker's true self. These include greater scrutiny and existing in a world that expects them to be a different person based on their gender- some of this often leading to oppression and violence.
However, the simple critiquing of gendered violence is too narrow a thesis for Ang. Instead, through subtlety and omission, Ang turns the spotlight on those who benefit from this violence as the real monsters. In the poem, "What doesn't kill me / Makes me," Ang uses black out to let the readers insert themselves into the poem:
The man on the bus calls me
A --------, the effort of his hatred
By omitting the most offensive remark, which is nodded as a slur word for homosexuals, Ang both avoids injuring the reader and lets the reader insert various meanings of hatred into this scene. This broadens the aperture of relatability and inclusion for the reader, letting us take our place in the speaker's shoes.
I don’t want to tell you what
he said next, how he screamed
at me and the other ------, the ways
he fantasized about our mutilation,
how the other men watched
and grinned like it was all a joke.
With scalpel-precision, Ang invites the reader into this scene of verbal violence by using the second-person "you." The speaker shows that the men don't just want to hurt them—the men enjoy hurting them, though who the "they" is is redacted, implying that any of us can be the victims of violence.
The second section of the collection is filled with questions fueled by these traumatic experiences. From a multiple choice test of memory's reliability to to a poem in the form of a pap smear process, the speaker dives into a more intimate look at why they have become who they are and how violence and experience has illuminated new parts of their waning side identity. But there is no clear answer to the violence or how to navigate it. Instead, the last poem of this section, the speaker emerges as the product of self-reclamation. No longer hiding in the shame of how the world has seen them, they begin to arrive at their full and glowing self through the acceptance of primal sexuality:
Something about forbidden
fruit, how the flesh gives beneath my fingertips,
makes me lick my lips with pleasure. My gorge rises
as I imagine tearing into the muscle and sinew
of raw pork belly, sucking the juice off the bone, bursting
with carnality.
This imagined bloodlust unlocks a rebellion in the speaker. While self-identifying as "a vegetarian", at an H mart, they abandon every expectation by "fingering the meats". They begin to eating the heads of fish and "pick[ing] the bones out of our teeth at the dinner table," the speaker makes a decision to abandon expectation- to be full and visible in ways they have only desired in private. And as "a thousand vacant eyes / Stare back at me, open-mouthed," the speaker chooses to continue to feast. They gut these expectations in the most public way. This act of reclamation of self serves as the turning point into the last section. Now, not bound by the limitations of others or the shifting cycle, the speaker gets to reveal their full self for all to see.
This final section opens with the poem "Owed to My Father's Accent." The title both nods to a traditional ode and a harkening to what the bloodline before us suffers for our freedoms. The speaker observes their father navigating space as part foreigner, part chameleon who follows the rules of blending in:
The way the plumber
shakes my father’s hand and says, I’ll call you
Bill instead. The way my teachers
refuse his gaze as they ask me
to translate his English into my own.
His calloused hands provide for his family and hold onto the respect of his child:
The same hands
that sold churros from a cart on the boardwalk.
Scrubbed grime out of a movie star’s
kitchen sink. Loaded boxes of frozen food
into an eighteen-wheeler truck by moonlight.
The same hands that never learned how to use
Chopsticks.
And while for some, watching their father struggle to use the chopsticks in a noodle house would feel like culture slipping through his fingers, for the speaker it is a place of connection. It reminds us that, in the smallest places we find ourselves, we hold on to who we are—we pass down culture and maintain legacy. Watching their father "bent over the bowl in reverence" reminds the speaker that the most natural act of rebellion is being one's truest self. So they and their father do not cut the noodles that signify long life. Instead, "[They] slurp them up / so loudly, the whole room / stops to look."
Ang's ability to impute light on the mundane and complicated nuances of life with equal gravitas are what make this collection a delight to read. The poems wax and wane out across the political and the personal with the grace of a shifting tide. While this world offers us gloom and despair, Ang shows that the world has ended a million times before, that we are not new to destruction or apocalypse. In fact, when we allow everything to fall apart, we can see our entirety in the moonlight and truly learn to rise, as the speaker does in the final poem of the book, "Hydra"
neck aching from the weight of myselves
I rise
leaving a trail of me in my wake.
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-known writer, educator, activist, performer, and and the first Black Poet Laureate of Houston, Texas. Formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World, Her recent poetry collection, Newsworthy, garnered her a Pushcart nomination, was named a finalist for the 2019 Writer’s League of Texas Book Award, and received honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize. Its German translation, under the title Berichtenswert, is set to be released in Summer 2021 by Elif Verlag. She lives and creates in Houston, TX. For more information visit www.LiveLifedeep.com