Prison Industrial Complex Explodes

by Mercedes Eng

Using found text from government reports, corporate websites, and her father's prison correspondence, these poems interrogate the possibility of a privatized prison system in Canada and explore disproportionate representations of Indigenous Canadians, people of color, and refugees.

Mercedes Eng is a teacher and writer in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish land.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

103 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 25, 2022

About the author

Mercedes Eng teaches and writes in Vancouver, on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories. She is the author of two chapbooks, February 2010 (2010) and knuckle sandwich (2011), and of Mercenary English (CUE Books, 2013; Mercenary Press, 2016), a long poem about violence and resistance in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver. Her writing has appeared in Jacket 2, The Downtown East, The Volcano, on the sides of the Burrard and Granville Bridges as contributions to public art projects, and in the collectively produced chapbooks, r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Surveillance, and M’aidez (Press Release). She is currently working on a women’s prison reader and a detective novel set in her grandfather’s Chinatown supper club, circa 1948.

Reviews

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is the kind of powerful I could never begin to sum up. I need to read it again, and also everything else I can find on the topic, and probably so should all of us. The collage format, the poetry, the message…powerful doesn’t even begin to describe what it communicates, and how it communicates it! Mercedes Eng is a marvel.

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am angry after reading this. I was angry before, but the injustices, indignities, and deplorable systemic mess that is portrayed in this book felt like a punch in the gut (actually, several, in a row).. it really shook me up.

Mercedes Eng is unflinchingly direct. Her writing is so potent it sent chills through my body while I read through the poems and materials she put together here.

Really glad this was recommended to me. I want to tell everyone to read it.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

really brilliant and challenging, it took me several months to finally finish it. but today i finished it all in one sitting, possibly because i've been thinking about the problems this book takes up in a more matter-of-fact, "this is what it will take to undo things" kind of way. hopefully it's not because i've become more numb to things, and more that i feel like if all of us who care keep at things in our own way, we can properly confront and undo these structures. it's not that this book is hopeful, it's that it fully exposes what makes things unjust in this country from within the heart of colonial empire: its prisons.

[Kathryn Mockler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mercedes Eng presents found material, list poems, archival material, fragments, and personal anecdotes to offer a comprehensive critique of how racism, colonialism, and capitalism impact the prison systems in Canada and the US with special attention made to the dangers that a for-profit system would have in Canada.

It's the perfect blend of the experimental and the lyric.

Highly recommend.

[Debbie Reads]

Not sure how to rate this. Read for my Prision Writing class

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

très bien construit, c'est absolument horrifiant

[Care · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will just read anything Mercedes Eng puts out because there's so much heart and fire in her words. She captures the humanity and complexity of human dignity and she's critical and sharp to the systems that try to take it away. Her work is one part unsettling and one comforting.

[Iz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I visited Vancouver about a year ago and picked this up from an indie bookstore. From the synopsis on the back, I thought I would learn about the ways incarceration operated in Canada and targered indigenous communities, as well as hear personal stories and experiences. For the most part this was addressed with prose, letters, photos direct quotes from government documents, policy briefings, news articles, TV shows, and more. The change in how information was presented through various mediums was highly engaging, authentic, and bluntly: showed how fucked up all this shit is.

Maybe I don't have enough insight (or maybe I am just overthinking?) but I think this might have been better if it was focused on fewer aspects of the prison industrial complex. Yes, the entire system is complex and broken and needs nuance to unravel all the fucked up layers that exist, but I think specific experiences deserve to be highlighted and focused on narrowly. Jumping between different mediums didn't throw me off, but I did find it challenging to switch from a US-perspective, to Canada-perspective, to addressing systemic racism in the US and history of anti-blackness in the creation of prisons, to Canada's anti-indigenous leglislature, to mentions of mental health and s*ic*de with specific cases, to deportation and what that looks like in the US vs Canada, and so on and on. I wondered what the book would look like if fewer issues and/or experiences were highlighted. Also a question that arose for me constantly is: Who is allowed to write what? (in relation to identity politics and lived experiences and presenting it in prose format)

Overall this book has made me want to do more research on the history of incarceration in the "West" (as well as find literature pertaining to LGBTQ+ experiences with the prison industrial complex) as I continue to educate myself on prison abolition.

[Sarah-Jean Krahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please check out my review in Canadian Literature at http://canlit.ca/article/authentic-ex...

[Westward Woess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is phenomenal!!

[Alexia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Soul breaking, heart aching, and revolution making. Mercedes weaves policy and prose to frame the inherent injustice and implications of the prison industrial complex in Canada and abroad.