Ellen Chang-Richardson's ​Blood Belies

Reviewed by Jérôme Melançon

(Wolsak & Wynn, 2024)

​Reading Ellen Chang-Richardson’s Blood Belies, I am reminded that we experience everything at once—only, in language, we must place words in some kind of order, in voice we must have sentences follow others. History and memory are merely given a semblance of linearity through our efforts at recounting them. Identity can be named only insofar as we tend to identify ourselves to others on a person-by-person basis, or one group at a time. And we struggle against the manners in which other people identify us, against the manners our bodies (and especially our neural architecture) cheat us out of understanding and comprehension, against the violence in interactions and in systems that create barriers to movement and to being through various minoritizations and attempts at eradication.
 
To create a sense of immediacy and wholeness that we can experience but tend to lose as we begin to speak it to ourselves or others, Chang-Richardson uses a wide array of poetic devices. As the back cover blurbs by Jen Sookfong Lee and Gillian Sze mention, land and landscape appear within the poems; they arise as structures, in structures. Given the use of blank space, spacing, typesetting, pure punctuation, fading, writing materials, and pictures, words appear, that is, they emerge as a field of perception of their own, they are present as parts of wholes and almost never as discrete entities, at once background and foreground. In combining these methods, Chang-Richardson does not exactly piece things together. Instead of attempting the impossible, they give us back pieces in new arrangements; they find movements, directions, patterns, without ever writing over the gaps, stops, and silences that come with the histories of bodies and peoples.
 
As a result of these explicitly-claimed manners of constellating words and page, we get to hold the gift of a book that adds materiality to the themes through which it threads: anti-Asian racism in interactions and policy; the weight of Canadian history in the body, as gravity; cognitive uncertainty and search for new forms of balance and focus after concussions; the destruction of the self through the destruction of the planet and of the future; interlinguistic differences—all this held through memory, and memory acted rather than held or passed on. As in “emphasis: a lexicon of language,” in which:

​    a small child stands before an epitaph
heritage               in the centre of a city, small hands             extend
                trace marble cold, carved infinite.

​The poem “between branches” can be made to illustrate what Chang-Richardson makes the poems do throughout the book, in part because it spells out in words what it does visually on other pages. They move from the self out through desire, or longing, and through various movements (sitting, breathing, swimming, dancing, spinning). They encounter resistance and hazards (crumbling, controlling, choking). They exist in rooms, forests, bodies of water, space itself. They twist and spin through these locations and movements and forms of resistance, opposing desire for and desire to avoid, approaching phenomena through their desirable face:

​I want to breathe not crumble
beneath our burdens
 
where controlled burns sustain
not destroy

​Longing, notably in the repetition of the simple “I want” that precedes short cascades of thought, is also a distanciation mechanism that allows Chang-Richardson to think about their ancestors and current migrants together, in their differences from each other and from them. The insistence of longing is felt in the alliteration but also in the clash of cs and bs. It is also felt as they end with the repetition of “& spin & spin,” holding up what the poem already carried, calling on us with the last word, “rewind,” to return to the beginning of the poem and experience its precarious balance again, as a search for balance and as a call for balance in our material and human environment. As the poem ends at the top of its second, left-hand page, a picture seems to fall slowly on the right-hand page, approaching and becoming a curved path just far enough to be approachable and desired, while leaving us free to take it or avoid its direction.
 
The book (again, book, as materiality and as a whole, rather than collection) breathes both within poems and between them, calls for our own breathing. It pauses, stops, gives us time, gives us space, does not allow us to pretend we can absorb everything, acknowledges our saturation and the author’s, does not pretend to tell everything at once, does not solve its own mysteries. 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.

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​Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water, was published by above/ground press in August 2023. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on various social media, with handles resembling @lethejerome.