Kwong, Bonnie Wai-Lee: the department of peace

In the department of peace, Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong invites us to a gathering of voices where each utterance matters. Kwong ventures into different languages and registers, time periods and places. From sailors' prayers to a mother's songs to a lover's last words, all lines render the contours of the poet's extraordinary sensibility.

Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong works in many mediums: poetry, music, theater, performance, video and software. Born in Wisconsin and raised in Hong Kong, she lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for two decades before returning to Hong Kong to care for her mother. She can still be spotted in California from time to time, visiting her two children. The department of peace is Kwong's third book of poetry, following The Quenching (Finishing Line Press) and ravel (Neopoesis Press). Renku.earth, an Elixir application she built for writing poetry collaboratively, was a runner-up for the 2024 Elixir Consultancy Prize from the consultancy firm Erlang Solutions.

"Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong's poems couldbe tattoos, bullets, shrapnel, coils,things that have escaped out of cannonsand traded deadliness for the awarenessthat comes after loss—all this againstthe backdrops of sky and a Hong Kong-California quotidian." — Judy Juanita, author of Gawdzilla

"The inevitable practice of living.Original inspiration." — Philip Kan Gotanda, librettist of Both Eyes Open

"With an unerring eye, [Wai-Lee Kwong] skillfully weaves together charged political critique, complex family experiences, and meditations on the natural world in poems that compel and reveal." — Maw Shein Win, author of Percussing the Thinking Jar