Böcker av Phoebe Wang

A lingering, long-haul collection of writing about sailing for readers of Julietta Singh and Kyo Maclear. Humans have sailed for centuries, but as poet Phoebe Wang discovers, when you step on a boat for the first time, the learning curve is steep. Relative to Wind documents Wang's decade-long journey of learning to sail, becoming an avid racer and volunteer race organizer, and interrogating what it means to be a relative newcomer to an old tradition. Wang delivers thoughtful renderings of her experiences--from colonial echoes in sailing language to a beautiful look at what it means like to work alongside prickly crewmates in tempestuous conditions, to battling the desire to quit or gender equity in the sporting world. Following the motif of a race course and structured as a kind of manual to help readers apply sailing lessons and techniques to their relationships, to their craft, their careers, to community and to place, these essays recognize the parallels between sailing and a creative life, and between sailing and a sense of belonging and relationship with the land, inspiring both sailors and would-be sailors to embrace restoration and wonder.

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.