Bearing Witness: Review of Ellen Chang-Richardson's Blood Belies
Ellen Chang-Richardson, Blood Belies.
Wolsak & Wynn, 2024. $22 CAD.
Order a copy from Wolsak & Wynn.
Ellen Chang-Richardson’s debut poetry collection Blood Belies is a tender and probing examination of how history can be traced through memory, mapping the orientation of the Asian-Canadian experience against the unyielding landscapes of “permafrost and / rust and dirty snow slush.” This striking debut asks us to bear witness to histories often obscured, forgotten, enduring achingly in the archive of the body.
The poem “storm surge” is a history of the speaker’s father that spans twenty-three pages as it moves between “opposite sides of the globe,” spiralling out from what their father has told them about fleeing Cambodia. Bà’s stories run deeper than blood, echoing in the speaker’s body which bears “the p u l s e of [their] father’s secrets in [their] veins.” These memories of displacement haunt the page, fading in and out, sinking under, bobbing up again, only to be heaved back to the surface by Chang-Richardson’s deft tugs of metaphor:
My father clings to the fantasy like a
drowning man clings to seaweed
man clings to seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
drowning seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
seaweed
Where images verge on loss, fading into the page, Chang-Richardson shows us what it takes to recover them, that rescue begins with remembering.
My first exposure to Chang-Richardson’s work was the poem “grotto,” an earlier version of which won the 2019 Vallum Poetry Prize. Chang-Richardson evokes “the whizz-whirr of insects,” the “swathes of swarming sandflies,” “sap weeping from tall, serrated sheaths,” each image so vivid and immediate the reader is swept into the visceral experience of the poem, sweating from the sweltering heat. I did have to rely on the Notes section to learn that this poem is a reflection on the Northern Gateway Pipeline, and likewise with the poem “infestation,” which responds to the work of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and considers the Ontario oil sands—diligent readers will be rewarded for consulting the back as they go.
This is a collection clearly invested in documentation, archive, witness; the series “resonate this,” Chang-Richardson tells us, “began as an intervention of Canada’s 1902 Sessional Paper No. 54 Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration.” Their one rule was to “keep italicized lines true to their source.” The various sources drawn from include Canadian Encyclopedia entries, 2020 newspaper articles, and childhood songs and games, in addition to the aforementioned report. The italicized lines borrowed from these sources, such as “Chinese labourers work under appalling conditions / to build the Canadian Pacific Railway.” are placed in the middle of the page with little explanation or context, forcing the reader to reckon with these sources alone, accompanied only by the surrounding whiteness of the blank page. We are asked to perform our own intervention of the archive, filling in what has been deliberately left out of what we know as Canadian history and out of the poem itself. Who were these Chinese labourers and migrants whose lives have been reduced to their expendability? Who deemed them “dangerous to the state,” and what kind of danger did the state pose to them? Chang-Richardson asks us to consider the silences that accompany these lines and their sources, assigning these omissions a weight that all of us must bear.
The speaker’s father returns in the third and final section of the book, “Rework,” in another long poem titled “tundra mist.” Here, Chang-Richardson recasts the story we were told in “storm surge,” declaring that “the real story I am told is entirely different.” This time, the poet considers the act of telling itself, struggling with the impossibility of understanding their father fully, as himself, “amongst his papers / the history of their weight, filling / the quiet room.”
We used to dance in the rain, he would say.
It was how we got clean.
. . .
Clean from what, Papa?
Clean from the blood, bǎo bèi.
. . .
But memory,has a way
of skewing.
What we remember, after all, depends on the stories we tell ourselves—and Chang-Richardson’s Blood Belies is a promise to tend to and tell the stories that live in between, to seek in them our collective truths.
Note: The block quote from “storm surge” appears greyed out in Blood Belies, however the effect could not be reproduced on web.
Bridget Huh is an incoming MFA candidate in poetry at Cornell University. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan and Canthius. She is the winner of the 2023 Vallum Poetry Award, and her debut collection of poetry is forthcoming from Véhicule Press.