ISABELLA WANG
I am an immigrant writer and poet residing on the unceded and unsurrendered territories of the Musqueum, Squamish, and tsleil-Waututh peoples.
Interview
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I'M DOING THIS WORK WITH PEOPLE IN MIND
With Manahil Bandukwala In this interview, Canthius editorial board member Manahil Bandukwala talks to poet Isabella Wang about her chapbook, On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019), her community involvements and organizing, and her current project on writing and translating ghazals. "Each of these objects have story behind them, as found objects, or objects given to me by very special people. I would lay them out and ask the teens to choose an object that speaks to them in some way, write about it, then introduce themselves through the object that they’ve chosen. So now, when I look at the objects, it’s not just my own story anymore. In this way, teaching has exposed me to different ways of seeing, the same way that meaning is made by a community of readers, and a book grows richer the more people read it. When I see these objects, I am reminded of my own story, but also the layers of meaning, added richness in these everyday objects that other people have been able to weave through their own different interpretations of them, their own stories." |
Photo Credits: Zoe Dagneault
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Pebble Swing
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"A much-anticipated debut collection from one of Canada’s most promising emerging poets."
Pebble Swing earns its title from the image of stones skipping their way across a body of water, or, in the author’s case, syllables and traces of her mother tongue bouncing back at her from the water’s reflective surface. This collection is about language and family histories. It is the author’s attempt to piece together the resonant aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which stole the life of her paternal grandmother. As an immigrant whose grasp of Mandarin is fading, Wang explores absences in her caesuras and fragmentation—that which is unspoken, but endures. The poems in this collection also trace the experiences of a young poet who left home at seventeen to pursue writing; the result is a series of city poetry infused with memory, the small joys of Vancouver’s everyday, environmental politics, grief and notions of home. While the poetics of response are abundant in the collection—with poems written to Natalie Lim and Ashley Hynd—the last section of the book, "Thirteen Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals after Phyllis Webb," forges a continued response to Phyllis Webb on Salt Spring Island, and innovates within the possibilities of the experimental ghazal form. |
"The poems in Isabella Wang’s Pebble Swing move like fireflies. Shying away from big revelations they offer brief, brilliant illuminations that last long after one has laid the book down. To enter these poems is to mull over history and place and to understand that the poet for whom there was no place for my language in this new country has made of language itself a home – for herself and for her readers."
— Eve Joseph, author of Quarrels and The Startled Heart
"Pebble Swing by Isabella Wang is a nuanced collection of poetry that is refreshingly, devastatingly new. Isabella, with her direct and clear-eyed poetic voice, takes on the markers of Canadian poetry—landscape, identity, and place—but makes them entirely her own. It is remarkable that a young Chinese Canadian poet can engage so precisely with the canonized literary past, while making sure her own linguistic fingerprint remains distinct, heartbreaking, and real. Pebble Swing is one of the most exciting debut books, in any genre, that I have ever read."
— Jen Sookfong Lee, author of The Shadow List
— Eve Joseph, author of Quarrels and The Startled Heart
"Pebble Swing by Isabella Wang is a nuanced collection of poetry that is refreshingly, devastatingly new. Isabella, with her direct and clear-eyed poetic voice, takes on the markers of Canadian poetry—landscape, identity, and place—but makes them entirely her own. It is remarkable that a young Chinese Canadian poet can engage so precisely with the canonized literary past, while making sure her own linguistic fingerprint remains distinct, heartbreaking, and real. Pebble Swing is one of the most exciting debut books, in any genre, that I have ever read."
— Jen Sookfong Lee, author of The Shadow List
On FORGETTING A LANGUAGE
See Michael Turner's review on The Ormsby Review.
You can find Kevin Spenst’s review of On Forgetting a Language in his “Chuffed About Chapbooks” column of subTerrain Issue #84, and Jane Shi’s review in Arc Issue #92.
You can find Kevin Spenst’s review of On Forgetting a Language in his “Chuffed About Chapbooks” column of subTerrain Issue #84, and Jane Shi’s review in Arc Issue #92.
