Lily Wang was born in Shanghai, China and immigrated to Canada as a child. Their poetry has been published in an assortment of literary magazines. Wang earned an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Wang is the editor and founder of Half a Grapefruit Magazine. They live in Toronto.
Poetry (Chapbook)
Everyone in Your Dream is You
Toronto: Anstruther Press, 2018.
Poetry
Saturn Peach
[Guelph, ON?]: Gordon Hill Press, 2020.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Ma misses the sun, warmth and colors of their faraway homeland, but her daughter sees magic in everything — the clouds in the winter sky, the “firework” display when she throws an armful of snow into the air, making snow angels, tasting snowflakes. And in the end, her joy is contagious. Home is where family is, after all.
In Saturn Peach, Lily Wang establishes a distinctive voice that is part heartbreak and part wise witness chronicling the strangeness of a technologized world. When asked to describe her book, Wang answered in her quintessential way, “There are things I never want to know but always know. Every day I live with them. Every day I live. I am like a young fruit. Like a peach, common, not the popular kind but oblate, saturn. I live and inside me this pale fruit, yellow and white. I take bites out of myself and share them with you. Maybe you taste like me. Maybe you hold this fruit and become a tree.” If ever there were a book that disarmingly – and seemingly effortlessly – encouraged its reader to become a metaphor, then Saturn Peach is it.
Fiction
Silver Reputation: A Novel
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2024.
forthcoming Feb 2024
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Having left China for Canada with her parents as a child, Yuè Yuè yearns to discover who she is as she nears the end of her degree and starts a new relationship. In urgent poetic fragments, she seeks common ground with her Canadian-born younger sister and grieves the cousin she lost touch with back home. Meanwhile, her date ghosts her, and her mother’s illness advances like snow. On a walk in the woods, Yuè Yuè sees a little girl digging in the mud, but when she peeks behind the curtain of black hair, her own face stares back, haunting her.
In endless perfect loops of memory and dream, loss and return, Silver Repetition tenderly illuminates the fullness of identity despite fractures in language, culture, and relationships.