Let the Moon Wobble, Ally Ang’s debut full-length poetry collection, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in November 2025. Pre-order here.
Ang’s debut considers multiple speakers’ journeys through concurrent apocalypses: the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the rise of fascism. These poems span a wide range of forms and poetic traditions, full of humor, lyricism, and endearing absurdity. They emerge from the speaker’s need to process their emotions and feelings of helplessness. As Ang aches for connection to their communities and lineage in a time of unrelenting isolation, their poems plumb the depths of grief and rage against the systems and institutions that aim to repress and kill queer people of color.
Coursing through Let the Moon Wobble is the deep desire for wildness, freedom from convention and constraint, and to be seen; the speaker often takes up so much space that they’re impossible to ignore or erase. Ultimately, where we land is in a place of hope and possibility where what’s“freshly broken” can give way to blooming. Let the Moon Wobble is a testament to the ways queer joy and community can fuel resistance and allow us to imagine radical new ways of being.
Praise for Let the Moon Wobble:
“Ally Ang is a poet who refuses the deadening distances of capital, borders, and patriarchy, embracing instead the richest, queerest intimacies of uncouth body, kinky breath, and collective revolt. These gorgeous, daring poems say: Let your eyebrows be as close as they want. Become the swine feral with love, the mango ungovernable with sweetness that this heartbreaking world needs. Welcome the moon’s song in your belly, where it has always truly belonged.”
—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
“Ally Ang traverses capitalism’s violent landscapes in search of xeranthemums and blackberries. But this is more than a hunt for pretty flowers and tasty fruit. It’s a lifesaving quest to reclaim the stinky, the freaky, and the wild as allies. Let the Moon Wobble is a collection of invitations to forbidden, overlapping territories: pleasure and disgust, engagement and hopelessness, audacity and fear. With unapologetic candor and humor, Ang’s poems carry us toward hardwon intimacy. These are poems as queer fruit: generous, spikey, ravenous, quenching.”
—Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium
"Ally Ang’s poems are made of houseplants and melatonin, leather and bloodstains, fresh fruit and rumpled bedsheets. They assert queer self-creation on the page in a poetic voice that is at once expansive and precise. Let the Moon Wobble is a striking, impressive first collection.”
—Electric Literature, “The Most Anticipated Debut Poetry Collections of 2025”
"Open-mouthed fruit feast.”
—Ms. Magazine, “The Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025”