February 2026: Jennifer Wong

Born in Hong Kong and now living in the UK, Jennifer Wong is a poet and translator. Her latest anthology, Light Year has just been published by Nine Arches Press and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. We are grateful to the Press for giving us permission to publish one of her poems from this anthology, "Therapist."

Light Year by Jennifer Wong is a meditation on time. These poems delve into the mind of a poet crossing spaces of deep wounds, love and healing: a constellation of friendships and love as she moves through upheaval, transformation and change.

The collection offers glimpses into the journeys of a migrant, a daughter, and a mother; with the passage of years, the poems ask what it might mean to move like light itself, beyond expectations and into new ways of understanding ourselves more profoundly. With sublime precision, Jennifer Wong’s poetry brings clarity to the spaces between the stars – the time difference between memories and place, between our loved ones, and everything we hold dear in life.

While the book is of course available on Amazon we would encourage you to support UK independent publishing by buying directly from the press -- as an incentive for our readers, if you do this and type LIGHT25 at the checkout, where it asks to 'redeem your code', this will take 25% (£3) off the cover price.

The anthology has already been receiving rave reviews:-

'Jennifer Wong’s dazzling collection maps a constellation of memory and generational inheritance with language that is both spare and luminous. From star factories to Golden Bauhinia Square, these poems assemble the fractured histories of Hong Kong and China while untying deeper knots of collective trauma. Crossing thresholds between the past and the imagined, Light Year reveals the fragility of what we inherit and the resilience found in re-telling it. History repeats, refracts, and reshapes itself—yet in Wong’s hands, it becomes radiant.' -- Denise Saul

‘From the galactic to the diasporic, Light Year traverses vast expanses of language, memory, and unforgettable intimacy. Skillful and graceful across a range of forms, Jennifer Wong’s unwavering strength as a poet is her undeniable imagery, at once sharply observant and softly holding of the reader’s attention. This is a poet who wants us to do more than see—witness, these poems say, and linger, and wonder.’ - Chen Chen

You can read further poems by Jennifer on our site from when we first featured her work in 2022.

Jennifer's first poetry collection, 回家 Letters Home, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2020, was been named a Wild Card choice by Poetry Book Society. She is also the author of Goldfish (Chameleon Press 2013) – which won the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Young Artist Award (Literary Arts) and a pamphlet, Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl (Bitter Melon Poetry 2019). In 2021, Jennifer was a writer-in-residence with Wasafiri.

Jennifer has long been a close supporter of our Centre, as guest editor of our Journal's special issue on Hong Kong literature, leading workshops on creative writing and helping judge our first creative writing competition. We were even lucky enough to feature two of her poems in our special issue of Stand magazine on 'Chinese Journeys', back in 2017.