Grief is something all of us know, at some point in our lives. Sometimes, it takes on different forms as we learn to breathe through it, as we learn to survive it.
For poet Isabella Wang, grief is something she has transformed into words and stanzas, grappling with loss and finding her way to recovery. Her second poetry collection, November, November, launches on Sept 22 at Massy Books alongside debut poet Christina Shah.
The poems span across four Novembers. In November of 2021, the Canadian poet Phyllis Webb passed. Despite never having met Webb in person, Wang wrote many poems in response to and dedicated to her.
“My first book also wrote in response to Phyllis Webb,” Wang tells Pancouver over Zoom. “And so this book is kind of a continuation of that work.”
Wang describes her work as “intertextuality”. Writing often feels like a “solitary act” but Wang believes that as writers, we are never truly writing alone. In particular, she pays tribute to many women writers, either through reading their works or reflecting their words in her own poems.
“It’s kind of an acknowledgement to my elders, my poetry elders, who were here writing before me,” Wang says. “And partly because it’s like a refusal to be alone.”
November, November is centered around grief and recovery from a major illness—two concepts that can be very lonely to experience. In Tolu Oloruntoba’s blurb for the book, he wrote that “community can be the most protective amulet”. For Wang, this is the truth, because it was the community that kept her afloat during those turbulent times.
Wang reminds us that two other poets, Lee Maracle and Etel Adnan, also passed that same November. What happens when the poetry community suffers such loss?
“Myself, along with many other poets, wanted to compose poems in order to give our words to the poets who have passed away, kind of as a send-off,” Wang says. “And also use our words to comfort our friends who are grieving, when they themselves are kind of silenced by grief, finding no words to express the depths of what they are feeling in that time.
“When you have no words yourself, there are others raising you, supporting you with their words. And when you have the capacity to write and comfort those who are going through hard times, you do the same back.
“And so for me, during that time, I was pretty prolific,” Wang says. “I was writing a poem a day, sometimes more.”
These poems strengthened by community can be found in the second passage of the book, each one dedicated to a friend who was also grieving Phyllis Webb.
Immediately following that November, Wang was diagnosed with cancer. Her grief changed shape, prolonging that November rain. How do you break the news during the winter holidays? How do you reconcile with your loved ones grieving for you, while you’re processing how to grieve for yourself?
“That was a year where I couldn’t really write poetry at all.”
The illness stole away her energy and words; the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic stole the community away from her. Being unable to attend in-person events was hard not only for Wang, but also for the poetry community.
“It’s a lesson in trust. You just trust that the words come, even though you’re not ready to write them right now.”
Even after the illness, Wang admits her writing process has changed. It was difficult to create new poems in the after. She reveals that part of this upcoming collection consists of revised fragments from drafts she had written before the diagnosis.
“In some ways, grief never leaves you,” Wang says. “Or at least, I refuse to let go of that grief, to a certain extent. Five years later, I’m for sure not grieving as much as I was that November, when every single day I was crying. But I refuse to forget that grief. I refuse to let it go.”
Grief, to Wang, is timeless. Poetry can be much the same—once written, it can be read years from now, or shared across the oceans, far beyond the author’s original reach. But the carefully chosen words on the page instantly bring readers back to an exact moment, an unforgettable feeling. Sometimes, it brings catharsis to be able to spell it out, providing relief from one writer to another.
Grief is interesting that way: it is at once a personal reckoning and a collective understanding.
Wang also expresses the grief of never having enough time to spend with our loved ones. Facing her cancer diagnosis amidst the pandemic, it was extremely uncertain at that time whether she would even be able to have the surgery to remove the tumour.
“It was conveyed to me by my doctors,” Wang says, “that to get a life-saving surgery for myself, someone else had to die for me to get that spot. Amidst this framework, it’s brutal.”
In immersing herself in the act of recovery, she had to accept time—including the loss of it, when her body did not allow her to write.
Time pervades throughout grief, like the web that weaves through the poems we write and the quiet battles we face in living each day. But its intangible nature allows it to slip between one another without noticing.
Wang tells Pancouver that November, November is filled with epistolary poems, dedicated to those that have left, and those grieving the gone. Poetry reaches across the distance time created between people and holds them close.
“There are poems that say, ‘I’m thinking about you, and I hear you,’” Wang says. “Especially at a time when communication during grief and illness is difficult, and I’m not always able to remind them or reach out to them and say that I’m thinking about them.”
Isabella Wang was named one of five “rising stars” by the Writers’ Trust of Canada earlier this year. Reserve a spot to the dual book launch event Huntress in the Season of Dying: A November Reckoning on September 22 at Massy Books here.
Learn more about the communities that make up Canada on the Toronto Spark website. Find the Toronto Spark on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
