Jody Chan & Jane Shi with guests shō yamagushiku & Brandi Bird

Join us, Jody Chan & Jane Shi's for their Dual Book Launch, with guests Brandi Bird & shō yamagushiku (joining virtually) October 17th 6-8pm in conversation with Mercedes Eng.

Venue & Accessibility:

The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver. We are located in the former MING WO building.

Registration is free or by donation and required for entry.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.

Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home.

Thank you kindly.

About the Books:

impact statement: A revolutionary call to arms wherein the arms are love, art, self-definition, and community care as an alternative to so-called care under carceral capitalism.

https://storestock.massybooks.com/item/LsYOQ1babcz2pya2PT2n8w

Borrowing and disrupting the forms of patient records, psychiatric assessments, and court documents, Jody Chan's impact statement traces a history of psychiatric institutions within a settler colonial state. These poems bring the reader into the present moment of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, capitalism and "money models of madness," and "wellness" checks. Forming a ghost chorus, they sing an impact statement on migration and intergenerational trauma, gentrification, and police neglect of racialized violence against queer communities in Toronto--and how the "wrong" kinds of desire, be it across class, race, or gender lines, or towards other worlds, are often punished or disappeared. And yet, these poems also make space for what can take root, despite the impacts--care teams, collective grief rituals, dinners around a table with too many friends to fit. impact statement imagines, and re-imagines, and re-imagines again, a queer, disabled, abolitionist revolution towards our communal flourishing.

echolalia echolalia

https://storestock.massybooks.com/item/LsYOQ1babcwZ239vJPzINQ

In Jane Shi's echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one's chosen family, love and justice.

"Shi extends her poetics in all directions with silky skill. Language flourishes in the realm of a poet like this."
- T. Liem, author of Slows: Twice and Obits.

About the Authors:

Jody Chan: Jody Chan is a poet, care worker, and community organizer based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of two books of poetry, sick (Black Lawrence Press) and impact statement (Brick Books), a member of Daybreak Poets Collective, co-host of the new podcast Poet Talk, and an editorial board member of Midnight Sun Magazine.

Jane Shi: Jane Shi lives on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəýəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Her writing has appeared in the Disability Visibility Project blog, Briarpatch Magazine, and The Offing, among others. She is the winner of The Capilano Review's 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest and author of the chapbook Leaving Chang'e on Read (Rahila's Ghost Press, 2022). echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024) is her debut poetry collection. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.

shō yamagushiku: shō yamagushiku writes from the homelands of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, B.C.). His first poetry collection, entitled shima, reflects ancestors, violence, and tradition.

Brandi Bird: Brandi Bird is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree and Métis writer from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh & Musqueam peoples. Their chapbook I Am Still Too Much was published by Rahila’s Ghost Press in Spring 2019. Their first full-length poetry collection The All + Flesh was published by House of Anansi Press in Fall 2023. Their work can also be found in Poetry is Dead, Catapult, Hazlitt, Brick Magazine and others.

About the Moderator: Mercedes Eng is the author of Mercenary English, Pr*son Industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, my yt mama, and cop city swagger. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review* and The Abolitionist. She was the Writer-in-Residence and a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University and recently co-curated her first exhibition with Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, Inside/Out: the art show my dad never had* Mercedes teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she organizes the On Edge reading series.

Event Venue

Massy Arts Society, 23 East Pender Street, Vancouver, Canada