Phoebe Wang was born in Ottawa and now lives in Toronto. She holds a BA in English from York University and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Her first chapbook, Occasional Emergencies, was published with Toronto’s Odourless Press in 2013 and her second, Hanging Exhibits, with The Emergency Response Unit in 2016.
Poetry
Admission Requirements
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2017.
PS8645 .A5327 A64 2017
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
The poems in Admission Requirements attempt to discover what is required of us when we cut across our material and psychic geographies. Simultaneously full and empty of its origins, the self is continually taxed of any certainties and ways of being. The speaker in these poems is engaged in a kind of fieldwork, surveying gardens, communities, and the haphazard cityscape, where the reader is presented with the paradoxes of subsumed histories. With understated irony and unsettling imagery, the poems address the internal conflicts inherent in contemporary living.
Awards and Honours
2018 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (Shortlist)
2018 Pat Lowther Memorial Award (Shortlist)
2018 Trillium Book Award for Poetry–English Language (Finalist)
2017 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design–Poetry (Second Prize), Jennifer Griffiths, designer
Poetry
Waking Occupations
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2022.
Will be ordered
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In a four-part meditation on what it means to live on occupied land and in colonial time, the subject of these poems has moved beyond arriving and departing and wakes each day to meet her commitments and to heal from complicities, exclusions, difficult truths and the pandemic of forgetting. It follows the figure of the female artist as a time-travelling woman, embodied by mother and daughter, through the gallery of memory. The poems enact brief encounters with objects, events, and works of art that hold us accountable. Finally, a set of shadow elegies mourn what the next generation has already lost, while searching for traces of the wild and for ceremonies that might mend us.
Waking Occupations is an urgent, essential collection that considers what we carry from previous generations and our liabilities to the cyclical nature of the work that uplifts us.
Anthology (Poetry)
Tok. Book 6
Wang, Phoebe. “Poems.” In Tok. Book 6, edited by Helen Walsh. Toronto: Zephyr Press, 2011, 61-71.
Links
Phoebe Wang’s personal blog, A Little Print
Publisher McClelland and Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada