Isabella Wang's ​November, November

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Nightwood Editions, 2025)

​It has been sixteen years since my near-death health crisis, which happened in November 2009. I celebrate my survival every year and am haunted by the fact that this moment could be my last. It is for this reason that November, November has a particular resonance for me.
 
In this book, I am drawn to poems that address the impermanence of life, the importance of caring and being attentive to people when they are alive, of celebrating living poets rather than waiting until their death, and the sharing of Wang’s own health crisis: a diagnosis of stage 2 renal carcinoma. Through engagement with the poetry of Phillis Webb, Wang weaves these themes into the book. 
 
I am overwhelmed by the strength of this book, its tenderly crafted images used to evoke such huge feelings of grief, care, concern, and life. It is a book that expresses how much poets are needed in this world.
 
I always begin reading a book of poems with the backmatter: the notes and acknowledgements and, in this case, the Afterword. Wang describes finding a cache of Webb’s recordings and transcribing the poems with poet and professor Stephen Collis; she writes of the importance of shared grief. She describes her inability to write following “cancer, fatigue and the brain fog.” These are vulnerable disclosures, and I bear them in mind as I read the poems.
 
The book opens with Webb’s “Here I am/Reading at the Planetarium,” which Wang discusses in the Afterword. Webb’s lines (unseen and unpublished previously) “Give me poets, a hand full of dust/before the skies/fall down,” offer a breathtaking image and frame the book’s themes. It feels like a rare treat to have the opportunity to read something few have seen or heard.
 
In the notes section, I am struck by how many other writers Wang brings in. One piece of advice I give emerging poets is that to write contemporary poetry, you need to read it. I’m also moved by the acknowledgements in which Wang shares lovely details about how she has been supported by people dear to her, and this support provides such a spirit of community and mutual care. I had these experiences also during my health crisis.
 
I like how Wang uses many different techniques in each section of the book, from lyrical poems to list poems to sonnets. The work is full of personification, pathetic fallacy mirroring grief, scientific language and wonder.
 
The first page in the long poem sequence Constellations opens with an epigraph from Chinese poet Ai Qing about rebirth. Each page in this section is framed in text boxes, which sets it apart from the rest of the book. I note a combination of wonder and science in these poems. The book is full of references to women writers of colour, such as Qing, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Sarah Ahmed. I think of writers with a practice of intersectional feminist citation, which, as Ahmed herself writes, serves as feminist bricks and feminist memory. I applaud that practice here.
 
The theme of immortality opens the book and continues throughout. How do we achieve immortality? By those who remain after we die to remember us. By the work we leave behind, by how we are remembered.
 
In Constellations, Wang brings together poets and fiction writers, manga characters, and nature, using scientific language and observations to give us a constellation of love and survival:

            their expositions
depend on the peoples
of lands
and revolutions
seeing them  imagining the bright sky
deep futures of their holding
illuminations
 
                                    until they’re gone

​In PASSAGE 2, a sequence dated from November 11 to 21, 2021, Wang uses the language of poetry, music and theatre to express her grief over Webb’s death: enjambments, line breaks, mise-en-scène, and tempo bemoan a lack of connection while alive, as if to underscore the value of poetry. This poem sequence articulates Wang’s grief over her loss of Phyllis Webb and serves as an elegy to the poet. 
 
PASSAGE 3 is dated December 2021 and is a series of nine individual poems, some of which are dedicated.  In IF THERE IS TIME, Wang writes about writing thirty-one love poems in her head. The poems in this section deal with her diagnosis and treatment. I was particularly moved by SOFT / for the poet ferrying to Galiano Island for a reading, the “you” in the poem referencing the speaker:

​everything we know
 
has collected water              edging felt-tip sky
longing as bowls after everything else fell   asleep
from the palpebrae of a monochrome world ferrying   on the backs
 
of a storm     that perspires  and falls     asleep too
while your walk takes
centuries of earth to form   there’s the sound
of a bog populating city of raindrops…

I feel plunged into a wave of images of water, of tears, of collecting, of longing and grief for what was and what may never be again. I also learn a lot from the beauty and precision of Wang’s diction. I love “palpebre of a monochrome world!” The poem PRAYER ON AN OPERATING TABLE echoes the imagery and the sense of longing for life. The theme here is consistent with this tension between permanence and impermanence, presence and absence, life and death.
 
I am fascinated with Wang’s focus on mortality and posterity in this book. It is mentioned throughout the collection, wishing that poets are celebrated in their lifetimes and hoping that their art continues to be acknowledged and known after their deaths. It's an unusual refrain, but it makes sense here when the poet has faced the possibility of death at a young age and has been highly influenced by Phyllis Webb’s death in 2021.
 
I am grateful to Wang for talking about her experiences and feelings about her cancer diagnosis and treatment. In TO OTHER CANCER PATIENTS in Passage 3, Wang writes to other cancer patients finding out their diagnosis near the holidays. Her articulation of observations of the beauty of the world while facing symptoms that hurt and a hospital stay are relatable to me and quite poignant.
 
The world looks and feels different when dealing with personal health trauma. For me, it slowed down, even while I was lying on an ambulance stretcher, waiting to be loaded in. I noticed every leaf, every scent. Wang articulates this for me when she writes: “it’s a beautiful/world transformed in night/and five inches of snow   and i’m halted by it” or when she writes in DESCENDING / for Julia Lunot

                       swimming isn’t the hard lesson
           we only have to learn once
                       in our lives
it’s trying to stand back up   when your feet
are being cut by barnacles
                                   who’ve known this world
much longer
                        and you have only
​
 
                the waves to latch onto

I know this feeling of precarity. Once again there’s this tension between impermanence and permanence. It’s rare to see a book of poetry with such a consistent throughline of theme.
 
In IF. THERE IS TIME, Wang gives a numbered list of experiences and feelings upon hearing the news of the diagnosis, and plans for surgery to treat the cancer:

​12. Some stories have no rising actions, no plot, no rest in the silences, no relief in the resolution of some long-anticipated denouement. I want there to be a record of this kind of story here on the hospital’s bookshelves. I want my voice to linger after I leave behind a record of my story others have typed into a database.

I find myself nodding my head in recognition when Wang writes, “18. I wonder: is there anything to love about the blue of a hospital?” and “22. My language doesn’t want to cling to meaning anymore. It is tired like I am. It is mourning.“
 
I think of all the poetry of pain, health issues and chronic illness that has helped me feel less alone and also helped to articulate my feelings on my experiences: Dominik Parisien’s Side Effects May Include Strangers on his seizures, pain, disability and the ageing body; Roxanna Bennett’s body of work on the mad, neurodivergent and disabled; Christine McNair’s Toxemia, a hybrid book of motherhood, the aftereffects of preeclampsia and of chronic illness; Elee Kralji-Gardiner ‘s Trauma Head on her mini stroke and its aftereffects.
 
PASSAGE 4 is dated November 2022.  It is a ten-page sequence. The poem returns to the grief the speaker feels over Webb’s death and to the image of constellations from the opening poem sequence.
 
PASSSAGE 5 is dated November 2024, and contains eleven poems, which include three sonnets and a sestina. This is the final section of the book. It goes into detail about the speaker’s experiences in the hospital during surgery and afterward. Once more, I have dogeared and starred many pages and lines and nodded in recognition so many times, I’m like a bobblehead.  I especially love the sonnets and the way Wang condenses language in such skilful concision to form crisp yet tender poems:

                                                                        my kidney
is not a ghost            not necrotic sheath or ash
it has no regrets without the rest of me [SONNET 1]
 
I think many people will relate to these poems.
 
 
                                  if illness
was a song        it would be cruel
for it to have a voice that sings     beautifully [DIAGNOSIS]

​November, November contains joie de vivre, spirit and empathy about how it feels to leave behind loved ones and to be the one that leaves others behind. They are deliciously written for the poet in me, but also carefully nurtured and tended for the me who has gone through a health trauma and is still trying to cope with the trauma of the experience, trying to understand, trying to live.

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Amanda Earl (she/her) is a working writer, editor, publisher, reviewer, and visual poet who writes on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Earl is grateful for funding received from the City of Ottawa to work on her manuscript of winter sequences. Earl is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry.  Please visit AmandaEarl.com for more information or subscribe to Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for musings on finding joy in difficult times.