Mercenary English

About this book

"Mercenary English is a long poem that documents the author's lived experience of the survival sex trade in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in the 1990s, using her time in the trade as a subversionary critical lens for exploring the physical, structural, and discursive violence of colonialism against Indigenous women and women of colour in its various instantiations. 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. Resonating in the streets and in the classroom, the book had been taught at postsecondary institutions across North America both as poetry and decolonial theory. Now in its third reprint, the book seizes its own critical frames through the inclusion of Eng's most recent iteration of "how it is", an ongoing poem-as-map; a new afterword on gentrification in the Downtown Eastside, the neighborhood Eng called home for two decades; and an expansive conversation with poet and critic Fred Moten."--