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Investigating whose safety really matters in the most expensive city in the nation,
cop city swagger conducts a threat assessment of Vancouver's police. Holding close lived and living connections to the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown neighbourhoods, Eng juxtaposes the police's and the city's institutional rhetoric with their acts of violence against marginalized people, presenting a panoramic media montage of structural harm and community care.
About the author
Mercedes Eng is the author of
Mercenary English,
Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize,
my yt mama, and
cop city swagger. Her writing has appeared in
Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers' Poetry,
Jacket 2,
Asian American Literary Review,
The Capilano Review* and
The Abolitionist. She was the Writer-in-Residence and a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University and recently co-curated her first exhibition with Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa,
Inside/Out: the art show my dad never had* Mercedes teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she organizes the On Edge reading series.
Summary
cop city swagger conducts a threat assessment of the police, spanning from 2019 to 2023 and grounded in Eng’s deep connections to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Chinatown neighbourhoods. cop city swagger scrutinizes the words “safety” and “care,” questioning whose “safety” matters in the city of Vancouver and elsewhere. Extending the critical and documentary poetics of her previous work, Eng collates and deploys language from sources both trustworthy and untrustworthy, juxtaposing institutional rhetoric with acts of neglect and violence towards BIPOC and unhoused people. With an eye trained on justice, cop city swagger presents a panoramic media montage of structural wrongdoing, working to map a system that is always moving and always obfuscating.
