Natalie Wee was born in Singapore to Malaysian parents and now lives in Toronto/Tkaronto. Wee identifies as is a queer creator whose work explores themes of race, gender, queerness, and nationhood, and is deeply informed by grassroots communities. They provide editorial and consulting services.
Poetry
Beast at Every Threshold: Poems
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022.
E-book (Access restricted to members of the university community)
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
An unflinching shapeshifter, Beast at Every Threshold dances between familial hauntings and cultural histories, intimate hungers and broader griefs. Memories become malleable, pop culture provides a backdrop to glittery queer love, and folklore speaks back as a radical tool of survival. With unapologetic precision, Natalie Wee unravels constructs of “otherness” and names language our most familiar weapon, illuminating the intersections of queerness, diaspora, and loss with obsessive, inexhaustible ferocity – and in resurrecting the self rendered a site of violence, makes visible the “Beast at Every Threshold. “
Beguiling and deeply imagined, Wee’s poems explore thresholds of marginality, queerness, immigration, nationhood, and reinvention of the self through myth.
Awards and Honours
2023 Lambda Literary Award–Lesbian Poetry (Finalist)
Poetry
Our Bodies and Other Fine Machines
[Toronto]: San Press, 2021.
Special edition.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website at Teh People Studio)
A survival manifesto and celebration song both, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines by Natalie Wee, special edition, is reimagined as both poetry collection and art object. Featuring never-before-seen poems and re-interpreted older poems, this edition asks us to consider what it means to exist in bodies that are pathways to extremes of grief and joy. Illustrating the body as a site of resistance, lineage, and testimony, this collection invites you to explore both the tremendous suffering and radiant possibilities of living: “watch me swallow / the hardest thing / my body has made / & live.”