Blood Belies
Ellen Chang-Richardson’s debut poetry collection, “Blood Belies” gives testimony to a timeline of anti-Asian sentiment throughout Canadian history. Written in the style of fluctuation between verse and concrete poetry, Chang-Richardson 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.’ Threading in their father’s life in Canada with their own voice and memory with an overarching push-back against our country’s institutional racism, “Blood Belies” is an important text that needs to take up space. The author’s ancestral rooting takes the reader from Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville and then Toronto, then from 1970s Cambodia to Ottawa, movement throughout this body of poetry is done multidimensionally, unnervingly and with conviction.
Divided into three sections, I. Record, II. Chew and III. Rework, I was left pursuing the meaning of choice of the titles of these sections, wanting to know more about the choice of the cover design and fully what went into Chang-Richardson’s concrete poetry. At times I was stumped, often I felt defeated and uncomfortable that the body of literature wasn’t delivered seamlessly to me, the reading experience felt like a rebuke and times I needed to set the book down and reflect, feel, and think. The contours of this reading experience, I knew, was an accomplishment by the author to enable their reader to enter, as best and intimately as possible into truly feeling what the writer went through. Empathy guided by an expert hand, I only wish I could have read this text in an academic setting with others reading alongside me, a Professor to help guide me, dialogue to be witness to and learn from, checkpoints to enter into and reference to other literary bodies in the CanLit community. Reading in isolation, truly another layer of encountering “Blood Belies” that succeeds in rendering this text as memorable for me, a text I know I will come back to, and a text that ironically might help fill in the gaps later, somewhere, when the time is right, and when that learning is needed.
Ellen Chang-Richardson has written five poetry chapbooks. They have appeared in Room magazine, Vallum Contemporary, Augur Magazine, The Fiddlehead, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Chang-Richardson is the co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series and are a member of Room’s editorial team. Lastly, they sit on the editorial board for long con magazine and the creative poetry collective VII. An award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent, their debut collection, “Blood Belies,” published with Buckrider Books an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers in the Spring of 2024 promises the beginning of a prominent voice in CanLit.
The cover design of “Blood Belies” pulls us into blocks of coloured strips running across the page to a palette of cool tones. My impression was a break-down of music or movie scenes, the cover is in fact a genome map. Created by Kilby and Paul Vermeersch, Chang-Richardson remarks in an interview with Room Magazine that “they put their brains together to locate an image that would reflect the content of the collection without being too literal and landed on an open-source genome-sequence map from Thailand. Genome maps evoke blood, heritage, language, and encoding, while also being highly aesthetic, abstract objects.” The title is written across red tape, a literal calling to of the experience of Asians in Canada and its’ bureaucratic discrimination and suppression.
The title eluded me for some time. Belies means to “fail to give a true notion or impression,” it can also refer to a disguise or contradiction. Belies can also evoke betrayal or failure to “fulfill or justify- a claim or expectation.” Chang-Richardson articulates that “Blood Belies” is the ‘bay leaf’ of their poetry, “in an earlier version of the manuscript there was a poem with the line “…full of brimstone and the belief I belong; existence that blood // belies…” but the poem itself didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the collection. It was too harsh, too angry.” The author removed this line and “held on to its sentiment instead.” There is so much that blood can be equated to, your position within society and your familial ties. “Yet, blood belies.” The blood that casts us into position, ironically is the biological river that connects us.
The collection of poetry is dedicated to “those who look like me, and for those who live between.” There is an inviting in and a necessary excluding. Writing against environments of normalized whiteness at a systemic centre, Chang-Richardson commands their language through structure of their own and mastery of the poetic space. There are numerous pieces of concrete poetry with circles of dates with bullet points in the centre, for instance, these dates trace the history and moments of racism in Canada from 2024 racist slurs hurled during the pandemic back through to 1902 when the Royal Commission had declared Asian peoples “dangerous and unhealthy to the state.” There is evocation of legislative exclusion with mention of the Head Tax and the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act. The reader goes further back to the memory, if you had learned of this history, of the deaths and despairing conditions during the building of the transcontinental road and train systems. And then, the reader is taken to a concrete poem in the shape of a bell jar. Titled, “hornet in a bell jar,” imagery of a hornet trapped in a jar, an insect feared, an insect to kill or to remove, plinking against the glass is the story of family trapped in Canadian society, I kept feeling, the poetry will let them out.
This collection is visually formatted, experimental and filled with vivid imagery and well-crafted verse. There are pages with underlines that look like misspelled red notifications from software with a Word Processor. In the middle of these spaced underlines the reader is left with a “[underline] like: [underline].” I read this as, one experience “like:” another experience. Or, one object or person “like:” another object or person. What is left out? What is missing? What disappears when forced into Western software, underlines of a spell check and a grammar check, the mother tongue obscured, the mother tongue made void, invisible, except for error? There are blank white pages. There are black inked pages that contain no language. There are pages with only one mark of a tiny plus sign, or cross. There is struggle in conveying or holding language, a story silenced with poetry or their voice. A white blank page is left. A blank white page takes up space.
The marks, underlines and breakdown of language is Chang-Richardson’s influence of music, also, a way to represent how they felt conveying pain. In an interview with Room Magazine, Chang-Richardson explains that “in the editing stage, I realized that the marks on the page reflected the way my brain and senses experienced the world during a post-concussion flare-up.” Therefore, the author’s experimentation with the way poetry appears on the page makes this collection intriguing. They continue, “experimenting with poetic performance—translating the marks on the page to sound—have been a way of reclaiming the slow loss and regain (and loss and regain) of language, and coming to terms with the helplessness those moments engender.” What I love about exploring this collection is the differences in my reading interpretation and what you find out afterwards when you dig a little deeper.
Thank you to Ellen Chang-Richardson, Buckrider Books, Wolsak and Wynn Publishers and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in request for an honest review!
Sources
https://open-book.ca/News/Ellen-Chang-Richardson-Confronts-the-Past-and-Perseveres-in-Their-Debut-Poetry-Collection
https://roommagazine.com/whats-new/what-bubbles-up-in-the-blood-ellen-chang-richardson-and-margo-lapierre-discuss-blood-belies/http://www.riverstreetwriting.com/blog/2024/4/18/power-q-amp-a-with-ellen-chang-richardson
