ISABELLA WANG
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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.

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."

READ ON CANTHIUS: FEMINISM & LITERARY ARTS
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Photo Credits: Zoe Dagneault

On FORGETTING A LANGUAGE


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

ONline publications w/ original photography

  • POETRY
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Hindsight

​The decade’s interlude leaves us in suspense
before the final act falls.

Spring goes on without us. The caterpillars,
ripe out of their cocoons,

are eating our misery in weight
and growing too thin for the pendulum of the wind

carried with their wings by flight.

From behind private apartment walls, basement suites,
the cadence of children’s footsteps

pass for May, June, July . . .

© Canadian Literature 2021

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READ HERE

筷子, "Chopsticks"

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​ [1]      chopsticks    an expression of the heart and determination
                                      arrives in pairs[2]

   
[筷]   semantic 忄    heart
            phonetic 夬     determination
              radical  𥫗      bamboo

the heart hurries        to light incense
                     prays        for another’s week of rain / year of harvest /gentle flood
         every morsel       motivated by determination and pleasure in one’s daily work

          we collected       rain in a pot
    served each day      fresh on a bed of steamed plain noodles / sesame oil
       

© Room Magazine 2021
READ HERE

Dramatic Monologue

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© The /tEmz/ Review 2020

You wake me up in the night
               to ask how strawberry the moon is
               when the earth
is in decline.
                         Outside the country,
hungry artists
               are turning fences      
into an acrylic pouring
               of the US-Mexican border. 

READ HERE

ON FORGETTING A LANGUAGE

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© The /tEmz/ Review 2018

I started choreographing
in my head again,
though it’s been two years since I’ve danced,
and the calluses between my toes
have grown tender. 
My feet have widened from lack of restraint,
my body no longer responds under command to
chaîné, détourné, développé/

READ HERE

I remember

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© The /tEmz/ Review 2020

And I remember     Poetry
        as both an immigration policy      
​                                     and the destination
that was a city

      wrote me.

 I remember       Road as metaphor
              for river and its significance to me.       
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READ HERE

IT'S BEEN WEEKS OF FOREST FIRES

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© Plenitude 2018

The hue of the moon
turned bright red as the blood
you coughed from chugging liters
of sour kombucha that doesn’t suppress
but stings like vodka.
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Past the seawall, there are geese
riding waves under skies
that have turned the colour of the sea to muck

READ HERE

Ghazal for Phyllis WEbb

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​© Minola Review 
Phyllis, do you feel the world transforming?
This era of digital uniformity, pig-human hybridity.

In some parts of the world,
they are breeding monkeys with two heads.

One kitten whisker in a vault somewhere.
I have forgotten the combination.

How else to respond but to write as Webb?
I open a new deck of index cards.

Blue, pink, yellow.
Phyllis, did you write them on the front side
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READ HERE

Expecting

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© Canthius 2020

Face puffy and porous
like a pomelo with dewy eyes,
Mama trains my body,
furls me in a blanket
rolled so tight
there will be no room
for mistakes.

READ HERE

LATE 

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© Room 2018

Everything’s late this year.
Nothing’s dissolved since my last visit to Waterloo--
an evening at the park staring at geese
and we took turns
pushing each other on swings,
pretending we were children.

I walked him to his dorm,
​orange button a dim glow in the elevator

as we waved goodbye,
steel door sliding shut in between us.​
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READ HERE

spawning grounds

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© Watch Your Head

A plastic bag pirouettes on the road. Watch how it heaves and falls in the air, clear as diatoms, like jellyfish in the water formation driven by the motor of vehicles pumping 250 mph, the wind blowing east and no one picks it up. 25 plastic cups, a nylon sack and two flip flops are not enough for conservation researchers to determine the cause of death, the sperm whale was too well decayed. A carcass washed ashore Southeast Sulawesi provincial park: a signal,
as 
villagers read. An innuendo seemingly to invite the words, come, butcher me.  So they do.


READ HERE

LUNAR FEAST

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© The /tEmz/ Review 2018

1.     A tanka

As other families sit
to feast at this year’s table,
I over-indulged
on the spring rolls and nian gao 
wafting out of their windows. 

2.     Year of the dog
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My mother made dumplings for the dog today.
Flour and water embraced to dough/


READ HERE

  • CREATIVE NONFICTION
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Eleven Stops Until I'm half way home
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© carte blanche 2018
read here
The first time I opened my mouth and spoke, he was taken aback. He was not expecting it.

​“So how come you speak English so well?” he asked me.


It was my first week of university and the two of us were crowded by the back doorway of the 95 B-line. 

I took a deep breath in and a deep breath out, before replying, “Uh, school? I guess?”

It wasn’t difficult to mask my differences in the beginning. I wasn’t aware of my speech impediment, how I spoke with both a stutter and a heavy accent, or the fact that I looked different from the other children in my class. But then a boy asked me how I could possibly see through those tiny slits of mine and I threw a hole puncher at him. 

I said, “I just do.” 
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Shortcomings of a JUVENILE

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© The New Quarterly 2018
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​My first science lab started out as my mother’s birthday present. Hoping to make perfume out of rose petals and water, I inadvertently discovered decomposition. In an attempt to study the phenomenon further, I left a carrot stick in my room for months. To my surprise,
I then witnessed crenation. 
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read Here

Rain Clouds

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© The New Quarterly 2020
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It is raining. A woodpecker, seemingly lost, is pecking away at our house, at the cement layers between bricks. While sitting in the car, my mother shows me how to print my name using the condensation: 清, which in Mandarin means clear; water; a bruise. I won’t be needing this name much longer.
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Read here

When one dream fails

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​© SFU English Department Blog
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​Five years seemed like a long time when I first entered high school. I thought I would have forever to figure my life out, and that by the time I stepped out of those doors, I would have procured a contract with The American Ballet Theatre. That was to become my dream— a prima ballerina dancing Don Quixote on the world-renowned, Mariinsky Theatre stage.
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read here

A Certain Light

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​© LWE blog: Life in CanLit 2018
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​My parents sacrificed time and their sense of belonging to bring me to Canada because the land offered more chances, and more possibilities for me to grow into someone more rich, prominent, and successful than themselves. In the end, I always knew that my parents would never allow me to pursue the arts. 
​Still, I persisted.
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Read here

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