Mercenary English

by Mercedes Eng

tagged: canadian, women authors

Description

Mercedes Eng’s first book is a risky and profoundly unsettling work of “auto-cartography,” documenting the struggles and politics of everyday life in Vancouver, foregrounding the literal and figurative violence behind the euphemism “missing women,” resistance to the Olympic-Industrial Complex, and other legacies of colonialism that continue to haunt the fragile “City of Glass.”

About the Author

Mercedes Eng is a prairie-born poet of Chinese and settler descent living in Vancouver on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ. She is the author of my yt mama, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (winner of the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) and Mercenary English. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, The Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review, The Abolitionist, and r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Survaillance, and M’aidez (Press Release). Mercedes was recently the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence and a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University. She is an assistant professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she organizes the On Edge reading series.

Contributor Notes

Mercedes Eng is a teacher and writer in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territory. She is the author of Mercenary English (CUE Books), which explores the potential of documentary poetics. Her work has appeared in West Coast Line, Canada and Beyond, The Capilano Review, and Geist. Much of her creative writing is grounded in struggles for social justice in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. In 2014 she wrote a series of articles on poetry and gentrification in Vancouver for Jacket2, Penn University’s online poetry magazine, and in 2012–2013, she wrote several articles for a community newspaper, The Downtown East. She has spoken at the DTES Writer’s Jamboree at Carnegie Community Centre (April 2011) and lectured on visual representations of the missing and murdered women of Vancouver at Simon Fraser University (March 2011).

Editorial Review

"a mercenary pursuit to unsettle, rechart, and set ships in motion. woman at the helm. “dead, almost and alive” making the money, women hold it down. honey cake. workshirts mended, an arsenal in her pocket, at the ready, everyday the frontlines. body of work on the table, more weapons in the drawer. “words are confusing…what’s the one for the big men dressed in boots and helmets holding shields, holding assault rifles?” interlocking violences to be disarmed, we call war. with all her might Eng speaks from experience, intervenes to right the vertical, spits hard words that shine like justice and the concrete trembles. “the eagles know”
— Cecily Nicholson

About BC Books Online

Mercenary English

by Mercedes Eng

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