Praise for Phoebe Wang and Waking Occupations

“Traversing the personal and the collective, Phoebe Wang’s Waking Occupations offers profound meditations on creativity and survival that honor artistic works as sites of memory, and that recognize the poet and artist as memory-keeper. Rich in ache and eloquence, these poems thrive in their gifting of language and sonic fluidities reaching across time and space. Wang’s collection restores toward a new futurity while refusing to be forgotten.” —Mai Der Vang, author of Yellow Rain
“The politics of this collection are experiential, immersive, are breathed in and out of the living body, waking or sleeping. The voice is often calm, meditative, but shot through with urgencies. I read the first poem again and again, couldn’t get over its uncannily embodied portrait of colonial trespass inflected by a doubleness of identity—a poem that is truly an 'embrace in reverse.' The subsequent poems are infused with the same intelligence, imagistic vividness and rich responsiveness to the world of and beyond the self. Read this book and feel your nerve endings extending more deeply into the multiple spheres of life you inhabit.” —Sue Sinclair, author of Heaven’s Thieves
“‘We had stable conditions until we didn’t,’ Wang writes, inviting us to glean insights from collective history and art. These poems are a precise calm in the midst of stormy weather, salvaging life’s humble moments from the catastrophe that is history, refusing monstrous calculations, and gifting us the possibility of a future, even when the system's odds have been stacked against life itself. Without guarantees, this book honestly attends to life.” —Rita Wong, author of beholden: a poem as long as the river