November, November

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Written across the span of four Novembers, this collection delivers a send-off to "loved poets" who are no longer with us.

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.

Author Bio

Isabella Wang is the author of Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions, 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 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, most recently The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us (Wolsak and Wynn, 2022). She collaborates with poetry in canada, and directs her own non-profit editing and mentorship program, Revise-Revision Street. She lives in New Westminster, BC.