A few years ago, during a trip to Chicago, I made my way to the Poetry Foundation to see an exhibit. The tall windows of the entry room displayed poems constructed with celestial images on a rich dark blue through which natural light shone. Looking at these life-sized poems among stars inverted the scale of the interaction; I felt somehow poem-sized. Poems came in other formats too: a stargazer planisphere, for instance, and a View-Master reel, which was also published as “Her Gaze” in Tab Journal. I spent more time looking than it took to read the text. Were these poems or artworks, I wondered. Before this exhibit, poet Monica Ong, who holds degrees in studio art and media design, printed versions of several of these poems on acrylic and mounted them in wooden light boxes like family portraits. Later, as I read—and looked at—the sheet-of-paper-sized versions in Ong’s book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025), the poems became more intimate than immersive. Were these really the same poems? Yes, the same words, with adjustments for scale and medium. But also, no, and I wanted to make sense of why.