November, November

The ruminative latest from Wang (Pebble Swing) pays tribute to the late Canadian poet Phyllis Webb, whose appearance in the book’s epigraph acts as an invocation: “Give me poets,/ a hand full of dust/ before the skies/ fall down.” Poets are addressed throughout the collection, which is divided into five “Passages” spanning from 2020 to 2024. Many of the poems, which adopt a rectangular form with caesuras and no punctuation, are in direct correspondence with Webb’s writing, and some speak to her directly. Both mortality and extinction haunt the edges—Wang was diagnosed with cancer in 2021, when she was a college student. Her writing appears deliberately elliptical in places (“propositions i could erase/ your and with a soft/ dinosaur eraser and tell you// in return that the two halves/ of what you think are fires/ and floods are just feelings—”), as though attempting to capture the inadequacy of expression. Descriptions of the environment are particularly strong: “the last swordfish in water’s/ nostalgia burns/ evolving into a monster// but survives the rainbow stripes/ of gasoline riding/ the roof of her home.” This cements Wang’s reputation as a rising star in Canadian poetry. (Apr.)