As a poet who creates for gallery and installation space, I wanted to make these poems in the style of sleep tapes. Which is to say that they also exist as audio poems collaged with ambient sounds that remind me of the sleep channels I turned to in order to sleep.

­Monica Ong is the author of Silent Anatomies (2015), winner of the Kore Press First Book Award. A Kundiman poetry fellow, Ong’s visual poetry is exhibited widely at special collections and galleries including the Center for Book Arts (NYC), The Institute Library (New Haven), and the Poetry Foundation (Chicago). Planetaria, her recent exhibition of visual poetry, has been exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and Hunterdon Art Museum. You can find her work in Poetry magazine, Scientific American, Tab Journal, and ctrl+v. In 2021, Monica founded Proxima Vera, a micropress specializing in literary art & objects, which are now part of many distinguished institutional collections worldwide.

Artist Reflection

These Insomnia Poems began as a series about the things that kept me up at night coming from someone who has struggled with severe episodes of insomnia over the years. I was looking at diagrams of Geometrical Psychology or the Science of Representation, An Abstract of the Theories and Diagrams of B. W. Betts by Louisa S. Cook, published by George Redway in 1887. In these attempts to mathematically model human consciousness and spirituality through geometric forms, I kept noticing the absence of ancestors, and thus the diagrams became the basis of visual collages I made with archival family images. The color in these diagrams also served as the basis of the types of insomnia I explore, influenced by Mary Ruefle’s series on the many colors of sadness in My Private Property.

As a poet who creates for gallery and installation space, I wanted to make these poems in the style of sleep tapes. Which is to say that they also exist as audio poems collaged with ambient sounds that remind me of the sleep channels I turned to in order to sleep. While most readers will encounter this work as visual collages and text in a book, my current installation-in-progress is turning the visuals into silk pillows that visitors can rest on while lying down and listening to these poems. Because I’m interested in interrogating the ways in which sleep is commodified, I am also imagining other components for a sleep kit as a kind of artist’s book.