Mercenary English

Mercenary English is a long poem that documents the author’s lived experience in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside survival sex trade in the 1990s, deploying her time on low track as a subversionary critical lens for exploring the physical, structural, and discursive violence of colonialism against Indigenous women and women of colour. In its strident and unsettling debut, Mercenary English seized the politics of language from the usual handlers and reassigned them to new terrains: the colonial battlefield, the racialized/radicalized body, and the insurgent neighbourhood. Now in its third reprint, the book includes a new afterword on gentrification in the Downtown Eastside, and an expansive conversation with poet and critic Fred Moten.