Blood Belies

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.


Reviews

Ellen ChangRichardsons debut poetry collection Blood Belies gives testimony to a timeline of antiAsian sentiment throughout Canadian history Written in the style of fluctuation between verse and concrete poetry ChangRichardson succeeds in making meaning of the literal page encroaching spaces and missing text their writing style echoes of feeling an experiential living in Canada as an other


Sarah Hailstone

A debut collection from Ellen ChangRichardson Blood Belies is daring in its expansiveness The poems ask and create space for contemplation questioning frustration and ultimately awareness examining systemic and institutional racism the politehypocrisyof Canada and personal and familial trajectories The poems are terrific in their untetheredness using experimental forms supple rhythm and fervid language play to unwind the mind


Wanda Praamsma
Toronto Star

In this singular collection ChangRichardson scores the page with line punctuation and blank space to hold a range of experiences family and national histories racism illness and injury


melanie brannagan frederiksen
Winnipeg Free Press

Beyond its beauty and its ability to be cherished as a material and spiritual object Blood Belies leaves us with the freedom to notice our own fragmentation and so to see ourselves differently as its author let themself do


Jrme Melanon
the tmz Review

Minimalism and visual elements increase the impact of the writing Incorporating silences and the visual equivalent of static between stations on a dial ChangRichardsons poems move between the overtly political and the familial interweaving the two


Frances Boyle
Freefall Magazine

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Details

Dimensions:

136 Pages
8.5in * 5.88in * 0.44in
256gr

Published:

April 02, 2024

ISBN:

9781989496879

Book Subjects:

POETRY / LGBTQ+

Language:

eng

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