Isabella Wang is a an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University where she is pursuing a double major in English and World Literature. Wang was born in eastern China but immigrated to Canada as an elementary aged child. She lives in Port Moody, BC. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published by many literary journals and a couple of anthologies.
Poetry
November, November
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2025.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
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.
Poetry (Chapbook)
On Forgetting a Language
London, Ont.: Baseline Press, 2019.
Poetry
Pebble Swing
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2021.
will be available
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
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.
Awards and Honours
2022 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC and Yukon Book Prizes)(Finalist)
Anthology (Short story)
The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us
Wang, Isabella. “Coal Flowers.” In The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese Canadian Fiction, edited by Dan K. Woo. Hamilton: Buckrider Books, 2023, 71-82.