Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Alex Wong's debut collection Poems Without Irony is a miscellaneous assemblage of aesthetic experiments with diction, syntax and verse form. They are poems produced in an irony-free environment and designed especially to be read aloud. The subjects and tone range widely: as a whole, it is not a book about anything in particular, but about particularity in general. Tensions between the natural and the artificial, or between what is meant and what is actually said, influence almost everything. The style is governed by a desire for simplicity almost equal to the lure of extravagance.