Isabella Wang [photo credit: Lj Weisberg] is the author of November, November (Nightwood 2025), Pebble Swing (Nightwood, 2021), a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019). Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc's Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry and Long Poem Contest, Minola Review’s Inaugural Poetry Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Wang’s poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and five anthologies, including Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020), They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2021), The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese-Canadian Writers Fiction (Wolask & Wynn 2022). She is finishing her MA in Sociology, and directs her own non-profit editing and mentorship program, Revise-Revision Street.
Amanda Earl
November, November weaves grief over the death of Phyllis Webb, the importance of celebrating poets while they're alive and your own health issues. You mention in the Afterword that during the summers of your undergraduate program at Simon Fraser University, you listened to Phyllis Webb reading her poetry. Your book includes lines from her poems. Was this the first time you encountered her work or were you already a fan? What it is about her poetry that resonated for you?
Isabella Wang
That was my first summer while attending university. I got a research assistant job with SpokenWeb, which took me to the archives of Special Collections at the SFU library. My job was listening to, and collecting pieces of data contained on cassette tapes from reading events that happened between 1940-80s I believe. Phyllis’s voice is there, with Fred Wah, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, and honestly, many of CanLit’s favourite poets. I was already aware of Phyllis Webb when I came across the tapes, but I paid her tapes special attention because she was a poet who had fascinated me a lot already by then. In various classes I took, Phyllis’s work was taught, and so I spent a lot of time engaging academically and creatively with her poetry. And also her photographs and art! I think on one level, her poems challenged me. It took a lot of creative attempts to understand what she was doing with her ghazals, breaking the form, for instance, and for me to recognize the significance of that as a first year English student and also a poet myself. As someone who danced ballet professionally for most of my early teens before I grew immersed in the writing community, I was also inspired by Phyllis’s own creative segues. For the last 3 decades of her life, she stopped writing poetry. A lot of people struggled to understand that I think. But to me, just because she stopped writing doesn’t mean her creativity ceased. She migrated to paintings, to photography. I have some of her pieces in my home. In that sense, she was a lot like me. I resonated with not only her poetry, but what she did after she stopped writing.
Amanda Earl
You use a lot of fascinating specialized vocabulary from medicine, science and other domains in the book. I’ve learned a lot of beautiful words. For instance on the opening page of Constellations, November 2020, you write
constellations
are ageless suns
reborn as stars
in the seats
of a conversation they can
neither ferry nor pine
for a different
steradian
arrangement
“Steradian” or square radian is a term used in three-dimensional geometry. The precision of this term is striking. Or in “Untitled for Otoniya J. Okot Bitek” you write of “polyvagal” rivers and “after everything else fell asleep/from the palpebrae of a monochrome world.”
I love the word “palebrae” which means the upper eyelid. I had to look up such words and I enjoyed that, enjoyed learning and also seeing how you applied these abstracts in a very concrete way, to strengthen the image. How do you have access to such language? Is it something you’ve studied or do you consult various dictionaries and reference books to come up with terms that articulate your desired image?
Isabella Wang
I think it’s a lot of both. English is technically my second language even though it’s my predominant language, so sometimes the way I approach words and phonetics is different. I also played piano when I was younger, and that along with the music during dance and ballet, I think helped me grow attuned not just to the meaning of words, but their sounds as well. The textured resonances of certain words often stay with me, words I often don’t even know the meanings of but conjure, perhaps, because I’ve come across them in brief encounters and made a mental record. Sometimes when I write poems, a word will come to me not because it works meaning wise but because it’s sounds right musically. And sometimes it so happens that the meaning is right too. Other times I think of a word musically, but it happens that I was in fact looking for another word that sounds similar but has a different meaning. Other times, I know what I want to say, but I don’t like how words sound. So out comes the dictionary. I use the dictionary a lot in all forms of my writing.
Amanda Earl
After my near-death health crisis beginning in November, 2009, I tried to write poetry about it as early as January 2010 and I couldn’t. I found it difficult to balance my need to make art with my need to be scrupulously accurate. I ended up writing an unvarnished and unedited account of my recovery and health crisis in the form of a blog. Can you talk about the process of writing about your cancer diagnosis and treatment and if you encountered any stumbling blocks or hesitations in writing about it? What it did it feel like to write about it and also to read from the book?
Isabella Wang
I wrote extensively about writing through health and grief in this article with All Lit Up.
As for reading it, I really enjoyed reading from this book just because it was new work, and I felt like this collection, the mood and vibe, is a better reflection of who I am than my earlier collection.
Amanda Earl
I love that you use a lot of different styles in the book. I was especially keen on the sonnets. There’s lots of play here. What would you like to say about playing with form and specifically about your experiences writing sonnets and why this was something you wanted to include in the book.
Isabella Wang
I’ve always been an admirer of form, and the way that different poets use or invent form. I especially love experimental forms. For me, the form of a poem is like a home for people. It’s hard for people to exist without stable sanctuary or a home that is equipped with their different needs based on their individual selves and bodies, and for me, the words I want to express operate quite similarly. A lot of the time, I don’t know what I want to do with the opening words of a poem, or what the poem is even about, until I am playing with a form that works. Many of the poems in this book take on experimental forms because I am simultaneously experimenting with how to live after severe illness and disability, through a lot of trial and error. I lose my stamina, energy, cognitive abilities as I was recovering from surgery. The brain fog was bad and I had a lot of incomplete poems. The sonnets actually began as long form poems. I wanted to mirror George Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. He sits at a cafe and is just listing all the things he sees and hears, ordinary things, wondering if he can truly “exhaust” a place by listing everything about it. I decide I would do the same for a period of time. Everyday list the things I see in my environment, except stuck at home, the place I am writing about is my room. Perhaps more mundane than the city of Paris, but this the place I’m stuck in, so I was wondering if I could transfer the monotony of my life in my sick body to my readers through that long form. Unfortunately, getting up everyday to list things was too intense when I had so little energy. It wasn’t a sustainable project, so I had to figure out a way to work with the one or two days that I was able to get up and list things. Which required a different form, something smaller, more contained. The sonnet worked given the constraints of the lines, and even though the sonnet was a form that greatly challenged me before, it worked when I tried it this time. Serendipity!
Amanda Earl (she/her) [photo credit: Charles Earl] is a working writer, editor, publisher, reviewer, visual poet, who writes on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Earl is grateful for funding received from the City of Ottawa to work on her manuscript of winter sequences. Earl is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Please visit AmandaEarl.com for more information or subscribe to Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for musings on finding joy in difficult times.
