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Current, Climate: The Poetry of Rita Wong
Current, Climate is an introduction to the environmental and social-justice poetry of Rita Wong. Selections from her poetic oeuvre show how Wong has responded to local and global inequities with outrage, linguistic inventiveness, and sometimes humour. Wong’s poetry explores the meeting places of life, language, and land—from downtown Vancouver to the headwaters of the Columbia River. Her poems are deeply attentive to places and their names, and especially to the imposition of foreign words on the unceded Indigenous lands of what is otherwise known as British Columbia. Exhorting readers to recognize their responsibilities to the planet and to their communities, Wong’s watershed poetics encompass anger, grief, wit, and hope.
Nicholas Bradley’s introduction situates Wong’s poetry in its literary and cultural contexts, focusing on the role of the author in a time of crisis. In Wong’s case, poetry and political activism are intertwined—and profoundly connected to the land and water that sustain us. The volume concludes with an afterword by Rita Wong.
Nicholas Bradley’s introduction situates Wong’s poetry in its literary and cultural contexts, focusing on the role of the author in a time of crisis. In Wong’s case, poetry and political activism are intertwined—and profoundly connected to the land and water that sustain us. The volume concludes with an afterword by Rita Wong.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
Published August 26, 2020
42 people want to read
About the author
Rita Wong
18 books15 followersRita Wong is the author of four books of poetry: monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998), forage (Nightwood Editions, 2007), sybil unrest (Line Books, 2008, with Larissa Lai) and undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015). forage was the winner of the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Canada Reads Poetry 2011.
Wong is an associate professor in the Critical and Cultural Studies department at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design on the unceded Coast Salish territories also known as Vancouver.
Wong is an associate professor in the Critical and Cultural Studies department at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design on the unceded Coast Salish territories also known as Vancouver.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 12, 2022
One of the books I borrowed from the North York library at the end of July. Ended up there because I missed my bus transfer and had to wait a while.
A very beautiful collection of poetry that was delightfully arranged. A lot of spatial experimentation on many pages. Art born from social action and political engagement. I know Rita Wong primarily through her solidarity work with Indigenous land defenders, spending time at the Unist’ot’en Camp.
Seeing Indigenous-immigrant solidarity makes me very happy. I just came back from an NSN protest in Mississauga, organized by an org largely composed of Punjabi workers who have banded together to demand back wages that have been stolen from them by their bosses. Nick Estes, an Oceti Sakowin communist was there, standing in solidarity with everyone in the cold, and gave a speech, in the middle of this remote industrial suburb in Mississauga. This solidarity warms my heart so much.
Anyway, back to this book, there were some really great quotes interspersed between her poetry like this reminder by Radha D’Souza, whose work I became familiar with through the Magnificast and was really helpful in thinking through concepts for a book review that I wrote:
“Is the economy serving us or are we serving the economy?”
There was also this excellent Audre Lorde quote in an introduction that Nicholas Bradely wrote for Wong’s book:
“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
There were also fascinating footnotes in some of these poems elaborating on the research that Wong did for a lot of the poetry in this book:
“Poet's note: 1887: "Chinese [girls] ... as young as six years old are brought to B.C. for Chinese workers and 'white pleasure seekers. Up to six crib prostitutes live in 12 x14 foot slatted crates in Vancouver's Chinatown. Exposed to the elements year-round, and ravaged by disease, physical abuse and starvation, many will die before they turn 13? (City of Vancouver Archives)”
“** Poets note: From 1885 to 1923, Chinese immigrants were the only people charged a head tax to enter Canada. Due to this racist policy, the Canadian government collected about 23 million dollars from 81,000 Chinese immigrants. This money has never been returned to its rightful owners. Today, Canada discriminates against Poor people by requiring immigrants to pay a so-called landing fee.”
I’ll just leave a few of my favourite excerpts from a couple poems in the book:
“the petro-state alike, giving us the days and nights by which to stand with the trees, what the oil industry calls overburden, or to die more rapidly, more stupidly, by peak oil. as rivers & oceans fill with carcinogenic wastes from the petroleum-plastic supply chain, the political systems follow, stuffed full of suncorpse & tired old neocolonial ego that refuses to stop growing until it reaches the limits of the planers patience.”
“seer sucker
the unstitched garment puckers
the subaltern cannot peek
her futures gambled on the casino market
stuck in the loop o
stealth martins, lockheed dupes
bombarde-bay
trickle down eco anomie
bears and curses
bulls and purses”
A very beautiful collection of poetry that was delightfully arranged. A lot of spatial experimentation on many pages. Art born from social action and political engagement. I know Rita Wong primarily through her solidarity work with Indigenous land defenders, spending time at the Unist’ot’en Camp.
Seeing Indigenous-immigrant solidarity makes me very happy. I just came back from an NSN protest in Mississauga, organized by an org largely composed of Punjabi workers who have banded together to demand back wages that have been stolen from them by their bosses. Nick Estes, an Oceti Sakowin communist was there, standing in solidarity with everyone in the cold, and gave a speech, in the middle of this remote industrial suburb in Mississauga. This solidarity warms my heart so much.
Anyway, back to this book, there were some really great quotes interspersed between her poetry like this reminder by Radha D’Souza, whose work I became familiar with through the Magnificast and was really helpful in thinking through concepts for a book review that I wrote:
“Is the economy serving us or are we serving the economy?”
There was also this excellent Audre Lorde quote in an introduction that Nicholas Bradely wrote for Wong’s book:
“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
There were also fascinating footnotes in some of these poems elaborating on the research that Wong did for a lot of the poetry in this book:
“Poet's note: 1887: "Chinese [girls] ... as young as six years old are brought to B.C. for Chinese workers and 'white pleasure seekers. Up to six crib prostitutes live in 12 x14 foot slatted crates in Vancouver's Chinatown. Exposed to the elements year-round, and ravaged by disease, physical abuse and starvation, many will die before they turn 13? (City of Vancouver Archives)”
“** Poets note: From 1885 to 1923, Chinese immigrants were the only people charged a head tax to enter Canada. Due to this racist policy, the Canadian government collected about 23 million dollars from 81,000 Chinese immigrants. This money has never been returned to its rightful owners. Today, Canada discriminates against Poor people by requiring immigrants to pay a so-called landing fee.”
I’ll just leave a few of my favourite excerpts from a couple poems in the book:
“the petro-state alike, giving us the days and nights by which to stand with the trees, what the oil industry calls overburden, or to die more rapidly, more stupidly, by peak oil. as rivers & oceans fill with carcinogenic wastes from the petroleum-plastic supply chain, the political systems follow, stuffed full of suncorpse & tired old neocolonial ego that refuses to stop growing until it reaches the limits of the planers patience.”
“seer sucker
the unstitched garment puckers
the subaltern cannot peek
her futures gambled on the casino market
stuck in the loop o
stealth martins, lockheed dupes
bombarde-bay
trickle down eco anomie
bears and curses
bulls and purses”
June 13, 2023
I appreciated Nicholas Bradley’s introduction for this selection of poems by Rita Wong. The variety of forms Wong is able to make her own is exciting and inspirational. It feels loose and experimental while the content feels extremely pressing and researched at times. The balance is necessary and allows these kinds of messages to get into a deeper place of understanding for myself as a reader. A fantastic read!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews