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.