Admission Requirements

by Phoebe Wang

A debut collection from a startling new voice in Canadian poetry. 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.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

60 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 28, 2017

Reviews

[Lata · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Poetry has always been hit or miss for me. This collection had some lovely pieces, and others that left me wondering what they meant. There were some wonderful sections in a number of the poems that resonated with me, even while the total piece left me scratching my head. Pieces I liked:
-Permanent Status
-Self-Portrait of a Diasporic Subject
-Still Life with Fallen Fruit
-Wreck Beach
-Jack Pine
-Custom Design
-Blue Irises
-Swimming Lessons
-Still Life with Sea Water, a Lake, a Frozen River, Bathwater, and a Fountain
An excerpt I particularly loved:

a buttercup or four-leaf clover pressed flat
inside a sun-toasted paperback

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have a problem and a hot take.

Problem: This book is probably good poetry. It was recommended to me by someone who I consider to have impeccable taste, is brilliant, and also happens to be my Token English Lit Major Friend(tm).

Hot take: Goodreads needs a function where you can decide whether you want your rating included in the global average.

I, the uncultured swine that I am, did not enjoy this collection and I want to have that recorded on Goodreads, so when I sort my library by how much I liked things, this is given a clear ranking. I found it too dense and I didn't *get* it. However, the poems sounded pretty and the themes I could tease out were interesting. There are so few books on the experience of being Asian-Canadian in particular and there were a few lines that really resonated with me. Plus, I so want to support Asian-Canadian authors and poets, especially now.

In the end, this collection just wasn't for me and my comfort level with poetry, but the fundamental assumption of the Goodreads rating algorithm is that if a book isn't for most people or isn't easy to read, *it isn't good*. When you put it that way, that's a majorly flawed axiom. How much would we suck as people if we applied this logic to anything other than books? "Yeah, this thing or service didn't bring any direct benefit to my life and so that should affect society's view on the net positive this thing is contributing to the world"... That's what we call being a selfish prick in the biz.

For example, in no particular order, here are other things I would give one-star but I'm glad exist for other people's sake I guess:
1) Black coffee
2) Mathematical constructivism
3) Bicep curls
4) Heavy metal

This is not even getting into the other fundamental issues of ranking books armed with nothing but populism and a 5-point scale: "grade inflation", differing standards and interpretations, lack of incentives for truthful responses, the influence of posturing / shame, and the lack of a single variance metric (a book with only 1 star and 5 star ratings is very different than a book with only 2.5 ratings).

Alternatively, maybe I'm just missing the point of a simple rating scale, overthinking this as is my MO, and should start a Medium account and stop cluttering everyone's Goodreads feed with my rants-cum-reviews (if anyone's even still reading this). This book gets a very conflicted one-star from me.

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the idea of Admission Requirements, and some of the poems were lovely. However, the book, as a whole, just didn't capture my attention. The language and the scenes being depicted were lacking some spark that could draw me in and paint the emotive range of what I was reading. Or I'm a philistine who doesn't quite know how to analysis and enjoy modern poetry. Either or, this was passable, but not as outstanding as the last couple volumes that I read by other authors.

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for Class.
I won’t lie and say this book wasn’t dense. That I didn’t have to read and re-read certain poems, to decode them with annotations and google searches. I did.
I will say that it was deeply worth it. These poems are beautiful, lyrical and ask amazing questions about colonization, immigration and belonging. I especially loved the garden poems and the symbolism of the plants Wang wrote on.
Totally masterful.

[Amal · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Poems of note:
Jack Pine
The Cloud People
Still Life With Dream Interpretation
The Birds Went First

Others kind of went over my head..

[Jayde · Rating 3 out of 5]

While a few of the poems in this collection captured my attention entirely, most of them did not. They were written well and Wang clearly has skill in the form, but I would have preferred a closer reading experience. I felt disconnected from the speaker in these poems, like I was watching some uninteresting event. There were some interesting turns of phrase and plays on language, but despite not being technically bad poetry, it wasn't for me.

[Léa Taranto · Rating 4 out of 5]

A promising first debut with a wide range of narrative free verse poems. I found myself drawn to the poems about the poet’s personal experience and family. Perhaps because there is an intimate immediacy to them, they had the most emotional resonance.

[Shirley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I need a version with annotated footnotes to fully understand the references and personal backstories behind each poem. The sentences themselves are artfully constructed, I just feel like I'm not appreciating them enough without context.

[litost · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good bits, lots I didn't understand. Likely I just don't know how to appreciate modern poetry.

[isobel · Rating 4 out of 5]

tenuous and perfectly displaced, disoriented, disjointed. i really fucking loved it.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rounded up, but it's a 3.5 for me. A poignant collection. The Birds Went First, the final poem in the collection, was stellar.

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could not concentrate on the poems so it's my bad🙏

[Eleana Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written collection that is rich in detail and easy to visualize. I loved all the personal landmarks, so many of which I felt at home in.

[Kim Fu]

Phoebe Wang’s polished, tightly controlled voice shines in the long poems of Admission Requirements (McClelland & Stewart), her debut poetry collection, where her fastidious style has room to breathe; her poems need a larger canvas before one can appreciate their subtle, low- amplitude shifts and thoughtful structures. Wang’s reserve and care best suit inherently emotional subjects, like narratives about her family, and tricky, high-concept conceits like “The Cloud People” (in which sky gods build a terrestrial city with only a dim understanding of how life works on the ground, a poem that can be read as sly comment about Vancouver)—ideas that would be messy, maudlin or overblown in lesser hands. For the same reasons, a few of the shorter poems and those on lower-energy topics, like nature, can feel a little stiff or opaque. But taken together, with its recurring themes of gentrification, empty-but-life-altering bureaucratic language, and the tension between being a child of immigrants yet complicit in our ongoing culture of colonization, the book provides a thoroughly modern and much-needed portrait of what it is to be Canadian now.

Review originally appeared in Maisonneuve magazine, Spring 2017.