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.

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).

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