Review by Jami Macarty
In her debut chapbook, When Sad Ones Go Outside, Monica Wang offers readers an immersive journey through landscapes both real and fantastical. With sensitivity and skill, Wang weaves together fabulism and lived experience to create a collection of prose and verse poems where readers encounter “ancient ones,” family members, romantic partners, and fairy tale characters, such as the “koi woman and tigerlily.”
In Wang’s garden of mirrors, her cosmos of ghosts, family members are often in peril or have left the earthly realm. Ancient ones appear to impart wisdom to our heroine, “adventuring” in the forests and brambles of her life. The characters from fairy tales offer commentary on power struggles, especially between genders. Each figure becomes a guide through the tangled woods of grief, memory, and self-discovery.
Whether outside — under the stars, on a walk, in a garden — or inside bedrooms, libraries, or traversing the inner terrains of written or unwritten pages, Wang’s writing seeks not only to understand sorrow but also to transmute it. What makes this collection special is Wang’s commitment to transformation through language. She seeks to shed the “bitter language” of past encounters in favor of words that can be heard “between whispering or shouting.”
“She lays down the mass of flame-colored blooms, where it burns without sound for the one who’s gone” is emblematic of her ability to transform grief into something beautiful, ineffable, yet deeply felt. Reading Sad Ones Go Outside is an invitation to experience mourning and magic side by side, to walk “hidden paths,” where loss blooms quietly into beauty.
When Sad Ones Go Outside by Monica Wang. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, June 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award.
