Current, Climate: The Poetry of Rita Wong

“our drowned, bloated arms wave / and who will wave back?”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 humor. 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.

Rita Wong is a writer, teacher, and waterkeeper. She is the author of three books of poetry and the co-author of several collaborative works, most recently, beholden: a poem as long as the river (2018), with the poet Fred Wah. With Dorothy Christian (Secwepemc and Syilx Nations), Wong edited downstream: reimagining water (WLU Press, 2017). She is an associate professor of Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she teaches classes in the humanities and creative writing.
|Nicholas Bradley is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. He is the editor of We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1987 (2014) and An Echo in the Mountains: Al Purdy after a Century (2020), and the author of Rain Shadow (2018). He is also an associate editor of the journal Canadian Literature.

Rita Wong is a writer, teacher, and waterkeeper. She is the author of three books of poetry and the co-author of several collaborative works, most recently, beholden: a poem as long as the river (2018), with the poet Fred Wah. With Dorothy Christian (Secwepemc and Syilx Nations), Wong edited downstream: reimagining water (WLU Press, 2017). She is an associate professor of Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she teaches classes in the humanities and creative writing.
|Nicholas Bradley is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. He is the editor of We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1987 (2014) and An Echo in the Mountains: Al Purdy after a Century (2020), and the author of Rain Shadow (2018). He is also an associate editor of the journal Canadian Literature.