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

“These poems tell us that the heart must come first. First to wobble in pleasure and pain and first to be represented by the moon, which moves the cycles of the body but also lights up the night, making safe passage through the dark. With humorous, surprising turns, Ang's poems offer a rambunctious howl against abstracting any body: human, vegetal, or celestial. They make liberation from one's multiple inheritances of love and surveillance; from all matters of the heart, even—especially—its breaking.”
—Yanyi, author of Dream of the Divided Field

"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”

"The emotions in Ang’s poems jumped from the line and into my soul. They explore queerness without filter or apology. The poems are radiant.”
—Debutiful, “The Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2025, Part 2”

"This year is a big one for our local writer heroes. Ally Ang is another queer, trans heavy hitter with an NEA grant and a MacDowell fellowship in their back pocket. Bolstered by this training and recognition, Ang swung big with this debut…This debut does not begin this writer’s career modestly, or on a small scale. Like their Seattle contemporaries, Ang blends humor and absurdity with grief and rage, and as a writer of color, tells on the systems and institutions functioning to repress and kill queer people of color. Ang seeks hope and freedom in these pages and…reaches into their community for the fuel they need to keep going.”

—The Stranger, “Lit Review Revue”

"Ally Ang’s poetry has been widely recognized and awarded, and their first full-length collection, Let the Moon Wobble, has been reviewed as yet another deft, striking work by the Seattle-based author. Set for publication in November 2025 with Alice James Books, their works find spaces for both the charm of humor and absurdity, and dark truths of a country plagued by crises of public health, the environment, and fascism. Whether expressing rage or celebrating joy and community, Ang’s poems raise up queer communities and communities of color who refuse to be ignored.”

—Bookstr, “Poignant 2025 Debut Poetry Collections You’ll Love”

"Let the Moon Wobble is the debut poetry collection from Ally Ang, an Asian, Queer writer. Ang’s poems gleam with queer pleasure and imagine a future where the freaks and bottom-feeders take center stage. The title comes from the opening line of the first poem, drawing on the lunar phenomenon of ‘moon wobble’ to evoke a queerness that is messy, off-kilter, and ungovernable. In these poems, Ang embraces the wildness of both nature and self, balancing irreverent joy with sharp critiques of pinkwashing and rainbow capitalism.”

—Platform Mag, “2025 in Verse: Standout Poetry Collections”