{"id":8803,"date":"2018-02-22T13:47:22","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T18:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/library.ryerson.ca\/asianheritage\/?page_id=8803"},"modified":"2025-04-27T19:10:19","modified_gmt":"2025-04-27T23:10:19","slug":"mercedes-eng","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/authors\/mercedes-eng\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercedes Eng"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Mercedes Eng is a teacher and writer of mixed white and Chinese parentage who lives in Vancouver. Eng published two chapbooks, February 2010<\/em> (2010) and knuckle sandwich<\/em> (2011). knuckle sandwich<\/em> is presented as the first section of Mercenary English<\/em>. She is working on a novel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Cop City Swagger<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Investigating whose safety really matters in the most expensive city in the nation, cop city swagger<\/em> conducts a threat assessment of Vancouver\u2019s police. Holding close lived and living connections to the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown neighbourhoods, Eng juxtaposes the police\u2019s and the city\u2019s institutional rhetoric with their acts of violence against marginalized people, presenting a panoramic media montage of structural harm and community care.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mercenary English<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Vancouver: CUE Books, 2013.
Expanded 2nd ed. 2016 (used to be available as a PDF from the author’s Mercenary Press site, now defunct)
Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2018. 3rd ed.
PS8609 .N43 M47 2018<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis of the Rev. ed.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In its strident and unsettling debut, Eng\u2019s Mercenary English<\/em> seized \u201cthe politics of language\u201d from the usual handlers and reassigned them to new terrains: the colonial battlefield, the racialized\/radicalized body, and the insurgent neighbourhood. This second edition of a book that quickly became something of a benchmark in Vancouver poetry and poetics now seizes its own critical frames through the inclusion of a new afterword and an expansive conversation with poet and critic Fred Moten.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

my yt mama<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2020.
PS8609.N43 M78 2020<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

In the follow-up to her BC Book Prize-winning book of poetry, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes<\/em>, Mercedes Eng continues her poetic investigation of racism and colonialism in Canada, weaponizing the language of the nation-state against itself in the service of social justice. my yt mama<\/em> is a collection of poems that considers historic and contemporary colonial violence in the Canadian prairies, a settler geography and state of mind that irrevocably shaped Eng\u2019s understanding of race as person of colour born and raised in Treaty 7 Territory in Medicine Hat, Alberta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These poems document an education in white supremacist ideology that began in infancy and occurred everywhere: at home where the author lived with her white mother, 1261 kilometres away from her Chinese migrant father\u2019s family; in public institutions such as the school, the library, and the museum that erase Indigenous peoples\u2019 histories while producing the myth of the \u201cvanishing Indians;\u201d and in the media and entertainment in which white supremacist beauty standards are constructed and reinforced. Keenly attuned to the language of those in power, Eng exposes the violence of the English language in the colonial project, taking on the words of Canadian politician F. W. Gershaw\u2019s history of the city of Medicine Hat as occasioned by Canada\u2019s Centennial, to derail the superficially neutral language of yt history that mythologizes nation and city while simultaneously deriding Indigenous ways of being (ontology) and ways of knowing (epistemology) as \u201clegends\u201d or \u201cmyths.\u201d Like the author herself, my yt mama<\/em> is hybrid: part memoir, part history, part discourse analysis, part love letter to her mother.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Poetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Prison Industrial Complex Explodes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2017.
PS8609 .N43 P76 2017<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Combining text from government questionnaires, reports, and corporate websites, lyric poetry, and photography, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes<\/em> examines the possibility of a privatized prison system in Canada leading up to Prime Minister Harper\u2019s Conservative government passing the Anti-Terrorism Act, also known as Bill C-51. This legislation criminalizes Indigenous peoples\u2019 attempts to protect their traditional and unceded territories from ecological destruction by classifying their actions as acts of terrorism, and it criminalizes refugees who, as victims of colonization and globalization, attempt to flee genocide and poverty yet are targeted as suspected terrorists. Simultaneously, the incarceration of Indigenous people, refugees, and people of colour is rapidly increasing as corporations eagerly court the government for private-public partnerships to fund the building of new prisons and detention centres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The impetus for Prison Industrial Complex Explodes<\/em> was the discovery of a cache of Eng\u2019s father\u2019s prison correspondence: letters from the federal government stating their intention to deport him because of his criminal record; letters from prison justice advocate Michael Jackson advising her father on deportation; letters from the RCMP regarding the theft of her father\u2019s property, a gold necklace, while in transport to prison; letters from family members and friends; letters from Eng and her brother. The cold formality of the government letters in accidental juxtaposition with the emotion of the personal letters struck a creative spark that led to the writing of this long poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Awards and Honours<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize<\/a> (Winner)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Anthology (Prose)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Eng, Mercedes. “Notes for a Subversive Sampler.” In Open Text: Canadian Poetry and Poetics in the 21st Century. Volume 3<\/em>, edited by Roger Farr. (North Vancouver, BC: CUE Books, 2013), 75-74
PS8293.1 .O64 2008 v.3<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Publisher Talonbooks<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mercedes Eng is a teacher and writer of mixed white and Chinese parentage who lives in Vancouver. Eng published two chapbooks, February 2010 (2010) and knuckle sandwich (2011). knuckle sandwich is presented as the first section of Mercenary English. She is working … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"parent":16,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8803","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8803"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20134,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8803\/revisions\/20134"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.torontomu.ca\/asianheritage\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}