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  • Published: 19 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780771099397
  • Imprint: McClelland & Stewart
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Waking Occupations

Poems




The second collection from the acclaimed author of Admission Requirements.
 


 

The second collection from the acclaimed author of Admission Requirements.
 


 

This astonishing new collection of poems contemplates our obligations to live in a creative, generative, and revolutionary way amid a cascade of global contingencies.
 
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.
 

 

  • Published: 19 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9780771099397
  • Imprint: McClelland & Stewart
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Also by Phoebe Wang

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Praise for Waking Occupations

Praise for Phoebe Wang and Admission Requirements:
 
Gerald Lambert Memorial Award, Finalist
Pat Lowther Memorial Award Finalist
Trillium Book Award Finalist
A Globe and Mail Best Book
 
 • “‘Best forget / the satellite on your shoulder.’ And then enjoy that edge of anxious anticipation as you consider Admission Requirements; relish this smart poetry as it outlines the conditions of a diasporic imagination. ‘The lineup [she’s] stuck in,’ Phoebe Wang tells us, ‘is moving faster than most.’ The ‘lineup’ is, of course, poetic language, rambunctious perceptions of a mental navigator reciting the biogeography of an indeterminate world. This poetry meets the deadline.” —Fred Wah, Music at the Heart of Thinking
 

Praise for Phoebe Wang and Admission Requirements:
 
Gerald Lambert Memorial Award, Finalist
Pat Lowther Memorial Award Finalist
Trillium Book Award Finalist
A Globe and Mail Best Book
 
 • “‘Best forget / the satellite on your shoulder.’ And then enjoy that edge of anxious anticipation as you consider Admission Requirements; relish this smart poetry as it outlines the conditions of a diasporic imagination. ‘The lineup [she’s] stuck in,’ Phoebe Wang tells us, ‘is moving faster than most.’ The ‘lineup’ is, of course, poetic language, rambunctious perceptions of a mental navigator reciting the biogeography of an indeterminate world. This poetry meets the deadline.” —Fred Wah, Music at the Heart of Thinking
 

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