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Waking Occupations: Poems
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.
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.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
Published March 22, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 9, 2023
Reread this as a procrastination tactic even though I have ten-page and seven-page final papers due tomorrow...
The first time I read this it was a largely affective experience, the simple phenomenon of letting Wang's precise imagery wash over me. This time I prodded more at its density which is another kind of pleasure in itself. The speakers of Waking Occupations search for identity on a country built on dispossessions yet which they must still seek permission from. Lots of smart ekphrasis and diasporic preoccupations with careful formal restraint that resists trite narrativizing or sentimentality.
Like Wang's first collection Application Requirements, she is quite smart about the title of this collection: the book is both a negotiation of selfhood in Canada as settler-occupied land and evokes that sense of inexplicable hollowness that only renders itself into being the moment after waking up when we're confronted with, basically, what to do with ourselves. The speaker seems to wrangle with the temptations of passivity in her encounters.
"I am admitted on a trial basis into a merciful heat, / into a generous blankness into the caesura of myself"
"What I mean to say is, something caused by force / could, with time, become tolerable and domestic."
"The trick is, how to be patient as a window. / Numb on one side, compensating on the other, / double-paned, with a vacuum of air in between."
"the scissor of sun through the birch, unrepentant."
"I slept between pastures sealed like a block of cold pressed paper, / embossed with the edges of what followed us here."
"The quality of silence, the fine, toothy grain of it, / snowlight through glass."
"Daylight ripped / holes in us that mended when we rose / wordless and eyeless."
Finally, an example of how she does the cascading list so well, in "for the Transient":
The first time I read this it was a largely affective experience, the simple phenomenon of letting Wang's precise imagery wash over me. This time I prodded more at its density which is another kind of pleasure in itself. The speakers of Waking Occupations search for identity on a country built on dispossessions yet which they must still seek permission from. Lots of smart ekphrasis and diasporic preoccupations with careful formal restraint that resists trite narrativizing or sentimentality.
Like Wang's first collection Application Requirements, she is quite smart about the title of this collection: the book is both a negotiation of selfhood in Canada as settler-occupied land and evokes that sense of inexplicable hollowness that only renders itself into being the moment after waking up when we're confronted with, basically, what to do with ourselves. The speaker seems to wrangle with the temptations of passivity in her encounters.
"I am admitted on a trial basis into a merciful heat, / into a generous blankness into the caesura of myself"
"What I mean to say is, something caused by force / could, with time, become tolerable and domestic."
"The trick is, how to be patient as a window. / Numb on one side, compensating on the other, / double-paned, with a vacuum of air in between."
"the scissor of sun through the birch, unrepentant."
"I slept between pastures sealed like a block of cold pressed paper, / embossed with the edges of what followed us here."
"The quality of silence, the fine, toothy grain of it, / snowlight through glass."
"Daylight ripped / holes in us that mended when we rose / wordless and eyeless."
Finally, an example of how she does the cascading list so well, in "for the Transient":
Today will contain reports of mismanagement
from higher-ups, routes no longer serviced,
geese overhead, portents of a shuttered season,
and at last, the inexplicable way you're greeted
at the station, enfolded into the ridges and valleys
of someone's soap-soft, animal smell, accepting
every door you left burning, every pillar of salt.
May 10, 2022
A hypnotic, lyrical meditation on what it means to live between worlds, between epistemologies, between heritages and centuries, wherein we fly with the intrepid speaker as "scavengers of belief" in a world made more intimate and recognizable by these tender, alchemical, art historical poems. This sustained, book-length aubade tarries through distances, encounters, emergencies, still lives, and artifacts, tying the act of historical witnessing to the warp and woof of word, colonial legacies, and materiality, powerfully evoking Wittgenstein's belief that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. A modern-day Arachne, Wang masterfully weaves her golden thread, "the spirit of saving/ seamed in me." Yet this baptismal collection will first plunge, unforgettably, the reader into the "watery film" of familial memory, and the metamorphic leaps between what we remember, conjure, and become.
October 1, 2024
Beautifully structured in four sections, these poems are a precise cartography of dream and the quotidian, exquisitely expressed through Wang’s particular perceptions.
“The silence is a kind of weather.
She woke up with it, dressed in its chill folds.”
“Here on the sprung earth…
What exchange for a story, a rift-making, a disturbance
in depositing my trailing and voracious spirits.”
“The silence is a kind of weather.
She woke up with it, dressed in its chill folds.”
“Here on the sprung earth…
What exchange for a story, a rift-making, a disturbance
in depositing my trailing and voracious spirits.”
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September 22, 2022Excellent poems, really, really enjoyed this collection.
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December 20, 2024insists upon its words, of which there are too many 😵💫
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews