Pebble Swing

By Isabella Wang

A much-anticipated debut collection from one of Canada’s most promising emerging poets

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Release date: Oct 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780889714076

Isabella Wang

Isabella Wang is the author of the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019). She has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry, Minola Review’s 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 three anthologies, including Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press, 2021). She studies English and world literature at Simon Fraser University and is an editor at Room magazine. Pebble Swing is her debut full-length poetry collection. She lives in Port Moody, BC.

Book preview

PebbleSwing_cover.jpg

Pebble Swing

Pebble Swing

A smooth river pebble on top of a puddle of watercolour paint, just off-center.

Isabella Wang

Nightwood Editions | 2021

Copyright © Isabella Wang, 2021

1 2 3 4 5 — 25 24 23 22 21

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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Nightwood Editions

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Cover Design: Angela Yen

Typesetting: Carleton Wilson

Supported by the Government of Canada Supported by the Canada Council of the Arts Supported by the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council

Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

Printed and bound in Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Pebble swing / Isabella Wang.

Names: Wang, Isabella, author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210244704 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210244747 | ISBN 9780889714069 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889714076 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8645.A5317 P37 2021 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

To Scout

for words said and words we knew without needing to say.

For this is the morning, the beginning of light.

For this is love, the season for things to grow.

—Simin Behbahani

Contents

I: I remember

This Winter in Gastown

Burned Out

Elegy for Winter

Lunar Feast

Ghazal for a Snow Day on the Mountain

Ghazal for Heirloom Family Recipes

Ghazal for My Grandmother

Redemption

I Remember

On Forgetting a Language

II: The last sketch of a retracting spring

Springtime Ghazals

Expecting

This Is Spring

Late

Synapses and Grass

Pebble Swing

Laying Roots

Mother Explains Men

Balcony

III: Rain falls, falling

Thirteen Anti-Ghazals After Phyllis Webb

IV: Hindsight

Subcurrent

Hindsight

On Visiting Habitat Island in Olympic Village for the First Time

Dramatic Monologue

It’s Been Weeks of Forest Fires

Spawning Grounds

Ritual Flowers

August

Occupational Hazard

Serenade No. 1 in Sunflowers

Acknowledgements

About the Author

I

I remember

A smooth river pebble on top of a puddle of watercolour paint, just off-center.

This Winter in Gastown

315 Carrall Street. A scarf around my neck.

This portion of Gastown Christmas-perfect,

you can almost imagine Tiny Tim next corner down.

The fashion boutiques I browse

with my eyes, faux furs flashing rhinestones

on collars, jewellers selling vintage keepsakes,

but I have no one to give them to. This season

I do not know how to celebrate the holidays.

The Victorian architecture stands from 1867

as Gassy Jack had left his own tavern, right down

to the cobblestones, to the horse-drawn carriage

running through this triangular peninsula at night.

The millennials are having avocado toast

on sourdough, Americano on drip with foam

extra frothy. The fingers of lovers interlocking

over wool-knit mittens. Look up.

Feel the warm glow of these coloured lights

casting