Alex Wong

Alex Wong is a poet and literary critic. He has published two collections of poetry, Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021), both with Carcanet Press. A review by Peter Scupham called the first book ‘extraordinary, exhilarating and teasingly idiosyncratic’. The second collection, Clive Wilmer wrote, ‘struck me—I don’t often say this—as hugely original’. Both books freely mix original poems with different kinds of translation and paraphrase.

Alex loves the sounds and textures of poetry, and his collections are explicitly ‘designed to be read using the mouth’. He values poetry as a form of communicative play that can be more or less serious (as distinct from solemn) in its playfulness and does not condescend to its readers. His poems have been praised by Elaine Feinstein for their ‘extraordinarily new rhetoric’ and by David Morley for ‘brilliant linguistic finesse’.

The appreciation of writers of the past, especially those who have become unfashionable or suffered the ‘condescension of posterity’, is closely related to his creative work. For Carcanet Classics he has edited and introduced anthologies from some of his favourite Victorian writers: Algernon Charles Swinburne (Selected Verse, 2015), Walter Pater (Selected Essays, 2019) and Alice Meynell (Selected Poems and Essays, 2025, with a preface by Laura Mulvey). For Headless Poet Press he has also introduced a pamphlet of Some Poems by Thomas Hood (2026). Among his other critical writings, which have often been focused on the literature of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, is a book on The Poetry of Kissing (2017), based on his doctoral research into Renaissance kissing-poems. 

Alex’s poems, verse translations and essays appear widely. A regular contributor to PN Review, he has also appeared occasionally in the pages of Cyphers, The Little Review, Shearsman and Stand, among other magazines. Poems of his have been included in New Poetries VI (Carcanet, 2015), The Forward Book of Poetry 2018 and, somewhat to his pleasant surprise and puzzlement, Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems (Liverpool University Press, 2021). He was a Hawthornden fellow in 2022. For some years he lived in Cambridge, first as a student and then as an academic. He now lives in London.