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.

Mercedes Eng is a prairie-born poet of Chinese and settler descent living in Vancouver on the unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Territories. Eng’s creative practice combines teaching in classrooms and on the ground, experiential knowledge, community organizing, independent study, and a hybrid poetics that deploys multiple forms of language from theory to memoir to historical and official state documents to art and photography. She is the author of Mercenary English, a long poem about sex work, violence, and resistance in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and my yt mama. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review, The Abolitionist, and r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Survaillance, and M’aidez (Press Release).

Mercedes Eng's profile page