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​ISABELLA WANG

I am an immigrant writer and poet residing on the unceded and unsurrendered territories of the Musqueum, Squamish, and tsleil-Waututh peoples.

I can be reached for event bookings on my "ABOUT" page, where a contact form, useable bio, and author photos are accessible.
For poetry, CNF, and general writing consultations, as well as private or small group workshops, please see the options I offer under "EDITORIAL SERVICES." 

Interview

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."

November, November

Nightwood Editions, 2025
​Artwork and Cover Design by Angela Yan
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Written across the span of four Novembers, this collection delivers a send-off to “loved poets” who are no longer with us.
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Dedicated as letters and long epistolary lyrics to those who are missing a loved one, November, November acknowledges poetry’s “palpitating vulnerable form,” and how sometimes a poem might be the only comfort that resides between silence and grief.
Isabella Wang’s second collection began as a tribute to the late Phyllis Webb, and was completed in the aftermath of Wang’s cancer diagnosis. The poems respond directly to Webb’s work and collapse the fine landscapes separating death and Wang’s own mortality. Over the course of treatment and “days [when] we don’t get to rewrite the history of our bodies,” the pace of Wang’s poetry slows down in the complicated recovery from cancer. Entering the cloudless silver of November days, her words tell a story of loss and illness, and her poems linger in the cold air, visible.
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"'Only the color blue / will not go extinct,' Isabella Wang foretells in what begins as a pastoral roll-call of leaves and wild fungi, the body’s / capering road” winding past rivers and conifer warrens, all resisting abdication to apathy while journeying toward repose. Attentiveness is our guide through the deceptively calm world presented in November, November, a catalogue of the cathedrals inside grief, a hymnal of memorials to tenderness and friendship, a manifesto of the resilience of body and mind against illness and loss. Pay attention. In this quiet observatory one can find, at last, a way to go on, and a reminder that community can be the most protective amulet."
                                                 — Tolu Oloruntoba

"November November is a baptism into Isabella Wang's poetry world. These poems are heartfelt meditations into the companionship of language as she documents the compositional lexicon needed to address grief, community, reading, disease, and, especially, the poet Phyllis Webb who died in November 2021. The poetry reflects what Wang calls "the cognitive disassembly [of the] after and now" and it does this by bravely performing in and around the tyranny of the lyric line through a range of formal innovation. Her prose poem "Prayer On An Operating Table" is a fit alternative title for this deeply intense poetic invocation."
                                                 — Fred Wah

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Pebble Swing

Nightwood Editions, 2021 | Read poems​​ here
​Artwork and Cover Design by Angela Yan
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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.
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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.
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"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."
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                                                 — 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

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On FORGETTING A LANGUAGE

baselinepress.ca | third reprint
​Artwork by Lan Yao | Chapbooks handmade by Karen Schindler
See Michael Turner's review on The Ormsby Review.
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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.

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