Blood Belies

A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

Contributions by: Ellen Chang-Richardson

In this arresting debut collection Ellen Chang-Richardson writes of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as she brings her father’s, and her own, stories to light, writing against the background of the institutional racism of Canada, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the head tax and more. From Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville in the late 1990s, Toronto in the 2010s, Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Ottawa in the 2020s, Blood Belies takes the reader through time, asking them what it means to look the way we do? To carry scars? To persevere? To hope?

AUTHOR

Ellen Chang-Richardson

Winner of the 2019 Vallum Poetry Award and the 2020 Power of the Poets Contest for their ekphrasis of Abbas Akhavan’s variations on a landscape, Ellen Chang-Richardson’s multi-genre work has appeared in Augur, Canthius, The Fiddlehead and more. A settler of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent, Ellen currently lives/works on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe (Ottawa, ON) where they co-curate Riverbed Reading Series and write collaboratively as part of the poetry collective VII. They are the author/co-author of six poetry chapbooks and an editor for long con magazine and Room. Their debut collection is forthcoming with Buckrider Books in Spring 2024.