Mercedes Eng, Cop City Swagger

 

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills but am not surprised when a mayoral
candidate says that 100 new police will make The City

            safe

I am taking crazy pills and I live in a brown body so I know 100 new
cops will not make The City

            safe

because people of colour with mental illnesses are not safe from the
police who hurt and kill us, who do not leave us

intact, unharmed, in good health, still alive

The latest from Vancouver poet and curator Mercedes Eng is Cop City Swagger (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), following my yt mama (Talonbooks, 2020) [see my review of such here], Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Mercenary English (Vancouver BC: CUE Books, 2013; Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here], furthering her ongoing trajectory of poetic investigations of racism and colonialism in Canada. Eng spotlights a blend of archival and first-person commentaries on police action, police violence, in and across Vancouver, and the foundations of violence that extend out from the office of the mayor. Set in nine poem-sections—“Core Values,” “Corporate Values,” “Coporate Values,” “Tent City Citizens’ Safety,” “Public School Safety,” “Public Safety Budget,” “Workplace Safety,” “Indigenous Women, Girls, Nonbinary, and / Two Spirit Peoples’ Safety” and “Chinatown Public Safety”—Eng composes a book-length suite of critiques on perpetual state violence on and across vulnerable communities, and the very question of who and what, exactly, is being served. “I take the alley,” she writes, as part of the second sequence, “which I shouldn’t. It’s one of the last public spaces people who use drugs have left and I am taking up room. Several people are using, a woman’s hand is swollen from an abscess, and little hunks of meat are littered on the ground. In Chinatown there are several butcher shops as well as dumpster foragers so refuse spilled in the alleyways is common but I see red meat cleaving from bone and cartilage for days. When I get to the church the police tape is gone and I can see blood on the sidewalk cracks.”

In sharp bursts of prose lyric, Eng employs elements of the long poem into precise action, perhaps not far from what Dorothy Livesay originally intended for the “documentary long poem,” a form she employed across her own blend of politics and poetics. Eng writes an extended lyric through the official records and official responses of the mayor and the police chief, articulating a lyric from the ground level of police violence, not in a way of glorifying, but to document what she sees. Hers is a direct and urgent lyric, composed through archive, gesture and appeal through class and poverty, and the ongoing assaults upon both. Offering this “Content Note” at the offset, she writes:

This book is about the police which means this book is about violence. This book is about the Vancouver Police Department’s violence against women. Black and Indigenous People and People of Colour, people who are mentally ill, and people who are unhoused and low-income. Readers will encounter evidence of the VPD’s excessive, sometimes deadly, use of force, racism and racial profiling, sexual assault, extortion, harassment of female civilians and officers, which led an officer to suicide, and their continuous failure of duty of care in regard to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Nonbinary, and Two Spirit People.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

An O. Henry Award winner, her short stories have been published in The Threepenny Review, PRISM international, The Dark and elsewhere. Her debut collection The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories was the runner-up for  the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award.

Other Evolutions, her debut novel, is forthcoming from ECW press.

She can be found on Twitter or Instagram @rhirschgarcia

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The Girl Who Cried Diamonds is my first (and so far only) published book. A lot of people asked me if I was excited when it was published but I wasn't. I just felt this sense of calmness. I always wanted to be a writer and it was like finally, the book is here, it exists.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

The world makes more sense to me in a fictionalized context and always has. I'm not interested in a world bound by possibility but worlds that are, currently, impossible. I find it so much easier to get to the truth of a matter when inventing the circumstances around it, something only possible through fiction.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I've talked to other writers and they kind of seem appalled by my process because I tend to vomit drafts out really quickly and there is more cleanup than editing involved in my work. But that's really because I spend a lot of time thinking. Years, decades sometimes. I'm sure I lose a lot of good work this way but I don't move until I'm ready. Even then, the writing often surprises me.

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A work of fiction is usually the merger of two ideas I've been puzzling over in my head. There are lots of ideas that I think over but usually when I add some strange second thought that's when I know I have something worth exploring.

I always know the form of things before I start working on them. I come from a theatre background too so I always have a feel for whether something is a play or a script, a short piece of prose or something book length. I think this comes from naturally being someone who writes "short". If I want to write a novella or something longer there has to be intentionality behind it. If left to my own devices a piece will be a short story.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Public readings are totally unrelated to my process and I view them as entirely divorced from writing or creating.

I don't mind doing readings. My mother  put me in drama when I was a child and then I went to a performing arts school. Those years of training mean that I am comfortable around large audiences.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I'm always asking questions in my work and mostly it's about human behaviour which is so varied and strange and mystifying to me.

Reading back The Girl Who Cried Diamonds during editing I think my predominant question was What happens to the people who don't get survive? I think as humans it's so much more comforting to read stories about people who go through bad times and come out stronger but I'm interested in the untold stories of the people who are still trapped in their nightmares.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Quite cynically before my book came out I thought no one really cares about writers. Especially ones from small presses like me.

But then I've found that as I've been introducing myself to people as a writer they get so excited for me, even if they've never heard of my book. So I think there is, still, a huge respect for writers in the culture. I'm almost treated like someone who can perform magic. It's humbling.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I've been lucky to always have quite good, very respectful, editors and I think the best ones are the ones who call you on your bullshit. They'll sense the weaknesses in my own writing that I think I'm getting away with and say, No, it's not working. I love that kind of ruthlessness. It's the short story writer in me but I love to cut.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Take what you need and leave the rest.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I tend to write at night because I am a night owl and that's when I'm sharpest but I don't stick to strict word counts or outlines or times. Sometimes my process is just lots and lots of reading and I'm okay with that.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I have too many ideas to ever get stalled and I think it's because I'm constantly reading. That's my advice to any writers who are stalled. Read everything! And I do mean everything: outside your genre, outside your medium. I've found inspiration reading fanfic written by preteens who are too afraid of the writing process to even read back what they've written. The tenses skip around and there are spelling mistakes galore and somehow in the midst of this there's still one knock out sentence. They're so raw and pure. It just reminds me that as writers we're all trying and we never really stop.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I'll let you know when I've found it.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I find visual things really stimulating whether that be visual art or movies or even objects. I have this story in my collection, "Mother," that came to me when I was looking at a silver Tiffany baby comb and wondering what kind of person would own a silver Tiffany baby comb. The comb in the story isn't silver and the story has almost nothing to do with that. I think anyone reading it would be puzzled that that's where that thought experiment led me but there you go.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I really love André Alexis' work. I've read other Ottawa writers but he's the first one where I thought that we were experiencing the city in the same way. Asylum was such a revelation to me. That was a book where I thought it almost could have exactly been written for me.

For my work I love reading older books and by that I mean ones written in the 1800s or older. I love the Victorians. Their language and thoughts were so different from how we express ourselves today. That difference in language always sets off some spark in my own mind. I'm not sure what it is, but it never fails.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I want to learn how to fire a gun.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would have loved to be a film director. I always loved movies but as a kid I thought I wanted to be an actress and by the time I realized that what I actually loved was creating stories I felt like it was too late.

I suppose it's not but if people think publishing is hard the barriers to creating a film are incredible.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It was never an option not to do this. My family likes to joke I was writing before I was writing: in kindergarten before I could write I would dictate my stories to the teaching assistants.

I was writing before anyone was publishing my work. I'll write after.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book I read was Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. It's harder scifi than I typically read and I was kind of iffy on the first book but the second book was where all the hard work of the first one paid off. It's brilliant. She's a genius.

I also want to shout out Camilla Grudova's The Doll's Alphabet. It's short stories and very eerie. It reminds me of the thoughts I used to have as a child.

19 - What are you currently working on?

My debut novel, Other Evolutions, which is coming out from ECW press.

But I've also been working on short stories. Everyone tells writers not to write short stories; no one reads them and publishers don't want them, but I can't help it. Every now and then I write one and I think, that's not bad actually. Maybe they'll find their way into the world one day.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Spotlight series #103 : Ellen Chang-Richardson

The one hundred and third in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Ellen Chang-Richardson [photo credit: Jessica Beauplat], an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn and North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

The Anstruther Reader, ed. Jim Johnstone

 

The pragmatism of a girl entering a room, drying her hands
the eroticism of a girl drying her hair, head bent

Contrary to common belief, hair cannot get wet.
I wash with my head bent forward beneath the faucet
sweeping forward into the stream, abstracting  the nape to a line.
The lines of my hair all singular.
Collectively immersed in water, there is a wetness,
but still each hair, taken separate, is solid.
Solids dissolve, do not let water pass through them.
It is the division between strands then, which is wet,
and creates the illusion of drench.
Same with a shirt. It is the spaces between the threads I clean. (Klara du Plessis)

I am deeply pleased to see the two hundred and seventy-two pages of the anthology The Anstruther Reader (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), edited by Toronto poet and editor Jim Johnstone, who co-founded the chapbook publisher Anstruther Press back in 2014 with his wife, designer Erica Smith. Subtitled “Ten years of Poems, Broadsides, and Manifestoes,” The Anstruther Reader dips in and through a selection of work across the first decade of chapbook-making across a press that has produced work by a wealth of poets across Canada, from Klara du Plessis to Jenna Lyn Albert to Manahil Bandukwala to Shazia Hafiz Ramji to Fawn Parker to Tolu Oloruntoba to Cassidy McFadzean to Shane Neilson to Michael Prior. One could see Johnstone’s thick and thorough introduction to this volume as an extension of the work he did through his critical volume Write Print Fold and Staple: On Poetry and Micropress in Canada (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], as he speaks of working to expand the boundaries of the press, deliberately attempting to mentor young poets and produce numerous debuts, and assembling an editorial board of young writers from various corners of the country to assist with editorial selection, to allow for a broader range of writing to appear through the press. As he writes:

When I published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21^st Century Canadian Poetry in 2018, I characterized the group of Canadian poets selected to appear in the book as the selfie generation. This cohort had published three books or less at the time, and were adept at bridging the digital divide by synthesizing multiple poetic styles simultaneously. Self-referential and self-assured, their poems moved quickly, as if they employed hyperlinks, “harnessing the echo chamber of the internet into a malleable, impressionistic music.” These characteristics still stand in The Anstruther Reader, though the poets are different. Read on and you’ll find representative samples from sixty Anstruther authors, selected to present the story of the press through the voices that have come to define it.

Sixty authors representing the press is an enormous heft of activity, and Johnstone even includes a complete checklist/bibliography of publications at the back of the collection, which is marvellous. Publications are listed by year and, one would presume, in order of publication, although the checklist leaves out print runs or any more specific dating (I’m aware that certain titles were produced in initial runs of thirty or forty, while other publications went through multiple print-runs). In my review of The Next Wave, I wrote of how I compared Johnstone’s editorial work—from his chapbooks through Anstruther Press to trade titles through Palimpsest Press—to that of fiction editor John Metcalf: you might not be interested in everything they might be offering, and the work will have a distinct flavour to it, but much of it will be of a high enough quality to impress. As editors, I trust their judgement, even if I might not care for the work of every writer or title in their roster. I still hold to this rather general overview, although I have to acknowledge that the core of Johnstone’s interest, the highly crafted first-person metaphor-drive narrative lyric poem, does occasionally expand to include more experimental approaches (work by Derek Beaulieu, Dani Spinosa and Gary Barwin appear in this collection, for example). Either way, the quality of the work in each of the Anstruther titles I’ve seen are rigorously high, and publication through Anstruther has provided numerous authors the push into subsequent full-length publication. The work and careers of numerous of the authors listed here have flourished since the publications of their Anstruther titles, in no small part thanks to Johnstone and Smith’s ongoing work.

Near the Garden (of Eden)

The sky looks mean. I get inside
to perk coffee to drink on-deck,
waiting for the storm’s admonishment,
its precaution. The toads
and crickets puncture the grassy
lot with their calls—I’m not jaded,
but I think of Him, how He
could’ve intervened more by now.
The air seems swollen. Everything
is suspended. Last time the weather
failed, a gale pushed through,
leaning our braced saplings over
as the rain curtain crossed
the intersection. Here, lightning strikes
the sky with a quick, forked tongue. (Shawn Adrian)

There’s something wonderfully archival about a collection such as this, assembling a portrait of a range of activity, specifically small press chapbook production, that might otherwise appear quite ephemeral, even geographically localized (as most chapbook presses usually are, although Anstruther does seem to have a rather broad geographic reach). A collection such as this, produced through Palimpsest Press, offers the benefit of bookstore distribution, something nearly and completely impossible across chapbook production. One can point to other collections over the years attempting to assemble a larger, single portrait of publishing activity, from bill bissett’s infamous the last blewointment anthology, vols. 1 and 2 (Toronto ON: Nightwood Editions, 1985/86) to Stan Dragland’s New Life in Dark Seas: Brick Books at 25 (London ON: Brick Books, 2000) or the two-volumes produced to celebrate the first decade of Gaspereau Press: Gaspereau Gloriatur: Book of the Blessed Tenth Year, Vol.1: Poetry (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2007) and Gaspereau Gloriatur: Book of the Blessed Tenth Year, Vol. 2: Prose (Gaspereau Press, 2007), both of which were edited Michael deBeyer and Kate Kennedy. None, one might note, were produced to collect or document chapbook presses (although one might argue blewointment leaned that way with much of their publishing history, and Gaspereau has had a lengthy history of chapbook production alongside trade volumes), and all I can recall across Canada for such activity, beyond the three anthologies I edited to celebrate decade-markers through above/ground press—GROUNDSWELL, best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press/cauldron books, 2003), Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2013) and groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Toronto ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023)—would be Hammer and Tongs: A Smoking Lung Anthology (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999), edited by Brad Cran, acknowledging the chapbook publishing he did in Victoria, and later, Vancouver, across the 1990s with Smoking Lung Press. Why aren’t there further collections around chapbook presses? I would love to see something of the four-plus decades of Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press, or even had a press such as Very Stone House collaborated on a volume of their 1960s and 70s work. Why not housepress, or pink dog or Rahila’s Ghost Press? Too much of this activity gets lost, overlooked. It happened, is happening; this is important, even if you aren’t paying attention. You should be paying attention.