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?

Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent whose multi-genre writing has appeared in Augur, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Plenitude, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese Canadian Fiction and others. The co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, they are a member of Room’s editorial collective, long con magazine’s editorial board and the creative poetry collective VII. They are represented by Tasneem Motala at the Rights Factory and currently live on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada).

Ellen Chang-Richardson's profile page

"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.’"

Sarah Hailstone

"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."

the /tƐmz/ Review

"Minimalism and visual elements increase the impact of the writing. Incorporating silences and the visual equivalent of static between stations on a dial, Chang-Richardson’s poems move between the overtly political and the familial, interweaving the two."

Freefall Magazine

"A debut collection from Ellen Chang-Richardson, '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 “polite/hypocrisy/of Canada”) and personal and familial trajectories. . . . The poems are terrific in their untethered-ness, using experimental forms, supple rhythm, and fervid language play . . . to unwind the mind."

Toronto Star

"In this singular collection, Chang-Richardson scores the page with line, punctuation and blank space to hold a range of experiences: family and national histories, racism, illness and injury."

Winnipeg Free Press