Poems are playful, precocious, and powerful things, and these are just some of the reasons we are so giddy to celebrate National Poetry Month by hosting the incomparable Ellen Chang-Richardson on our blog, as part of our Power Q & A series.
Ellen’s poems use the power of blank space to make bold, breathtaking statements and allow room for exploration. In their just-released debut poetry collection, Blood Belies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024), Ellen writes of race, of injury, and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of the page. They bring their father’s, and their own, stories to light, writing against the background of the institutional racism of Canada, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the head tax and more. From Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville in the late 1990s, Toronto in the 2010s, Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Ottawa in the 2020s, Blood Belies takes the reader through time, asking them what it means to look the way we do? To carry scars? To persevere? To hope?
Welcome, Ellen!
Bring home Blood Belies by Ellen Chang-Richardson.
Q: What advice do you have for poets who want to play with visual space on the page?
A: Be intentional — ask yourself: what do you want the words, spacing, enjambment, marks (i.e., commas, dashes, etc.) and blank page to say? What are the reasons behind your visual choices?
In “only sunken areas hold weight,” for instance, the poem’s placement on the page speaks to the physical weight of covering up disability and living with anxiety disorder, as much as it does the process of intaglio printmaking and the use of fire and crystals in healing rituals. The poem starts low on the page and finishes with words that flutter down like sparks off a flame.
Visual space is about intentionality but it’s also about gut instinct. Pull inspiration from all aspects of your life and remember to play.
Ellen Chang-Richardson (Photo credit: Curtis Perry.)
More about Ellen Chang-Richardson:
Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent whose multi-genre writing has appeared in Augur, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Plenitude, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese Canadian Fiction and others. The co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, they are a member of Room’s editorial collective, long con magazine’s editorial board and the creative poetry collective VII. They are represented by Tasneem Motala at the Rights Factory and currently live on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada).