‘Another eviction season’
SCAR/CITY
by Daniela Elza
Montreal: McGill Queen’s UP, 2025
$19.95 / 9780228023739
Reviewed by Jane Frankish
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Daniela Elza’s SCAR/CITY is a collection of poems that explores the ethics of housing in the City of Vancouver and beyond.
The collection places itself in the space between real estate and the people; between landlords, developers, and city officials on the one hand, and tenants and the homeless on the other. It suggests that the real estate market is consuming the moral fabric of Vancouver. There is a hollowing out of sustainable housing initiatives, a loss of community, and a displacement of poorer households.
“SCAR/CITY,” the poem after which the collection is titled, is like a call to action, a protest, and an accusation. Elza invokes Leon Trotsky’s comment on the inevitability of war in a paraphrase,
you may not be interested in real estate
but real estate is interested in you –
She gives us an image of the brutality of urbanization—
Downtown skyscrapers sharpen the winds
train them in the art of
petty theft.
like thugs they punch the breath out of me as I
turn a bruised corner
into another eviction season.
In this collection, symbols replace letters, capitalizations appear in the middle of words, punctuation is misused and, above all, spacing is used unconventionally. Writing elements—dots, lines, marks, and separations—draw the reader into the page, just as architectural elements might lead the eye into a cityscape. The title of one poem—
“CON/
/VERSIONS II”
—exemplifies Elza’s graphic play. The title is broken, divided by a slash and dropped down a line—“CON” alluding to the trickery of Vancouver’s real estate and “VERSIONS” possibly referring to the approaches to Vancouver’s housing market. In the second sequence of this poem the letter S is replaced with dollar signs, signifying profit above community; investment above a sustainable housing strategy:
Bright surface$ concrete higher and higher
at every turn
the eye is trapped in the $harp angle$ of
a $ $ e t & p r o f i t $ $ $
so much gla$$ turns this city into $moke
and mirror$
Sometimes the letters in a line are distorted. In “City of ReFlexions,” Elza plays with font size and capitalization to articulate and reveal undercurrents, creating metaphors for displacement. This is seen in the title itself, as well as in the example below—
v a C a n t lot.
family
s p l i c e d
into an equation of stucco.
In “THE MARKET KNOWS (found poem),” the poet appears to repurpose a section of text from a document explaining how a missile guidance algorithm works, and changed just one word. This maneuver brings the explosive connotations of a ballistic missile to bear on the Vancouver housing situation, “The Market knows w[h]ere it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t.”
The poet tells us in a footnote, “I substituted Market in the place of Missile in ‘GLCM Guidance System’.” GLCM is the acronym for Ground Launch Cruise Missile. The substitution is pointed and suggests that both missiles and markets are guided anonymously.
“ASP.HALT SPRING” presents as a concrete poem of sorts. The text takes an ovoid form, and is oriented horizontally on the page. A conflict arises as the reader tends to respond to the form and read the poem in a circular fashion, clockwise or anticlockwise. The meaning falls apart, and it is only when read line by line, from left to right and across the page, does the poem fully decode.
b.lack pavement
yawns in his empty
belly.
The effect is that of a poetic ‘sinkhole’—a cavernous image which alludes to poverty, hunger, destitution, and the inhumanity of a financialized urban landscape.
In the closing essay, “:UNDER CONSTRUCTION:” Elza tells us that she resides in a housing co-op and has a sense of belonging to the co-op community. She writes, “We are a beehive buzzing with care for community and living spaces maintained for generations.”
Co-ops are community-owned properties where members share ownership and responsibility for their homes. The 1973 amendments to the National Housing Act established housing co-operatives as a viable housing model across Canada. Today, however, co-operative housing is no longer a significant part of Vancouver’s housing agenda. Elza’s co-op sits on land leased from the City of Vancouver, and as the lease expires, members will find themselves in a vulnerable situation. The city may take the land back, as Elza explains in “Adver/city II”
our co-op houses a long-term vision
in a city with short-term politics
& shorter term memory.
we live on a real estate fault line
keep wondering whose fault it is.
Like the poet, I live in a Vancouver housing co-op. I also lament the fact that the neo-liberal turn towards the financialization of housing in Vancouver means that this co-op living is now a rare privilege in our city.
This collection is arranged in clusters, and the third fragment of one such grouping presents a response, in the voice of the homeless, to the inadequate SRO (or Single Room Occupancy) that is put forward as a solution,
the unhoused say:
we do not want your SRO’s with their
rules restrictions and hazards.
no one wants to die alone
between four walls.
The city’s solution to housing is to cram everyone, even homeowners, into small spaces. In “Adver/city II” Elza points out that this is simply a cash grab for developers; Elza (the broken boat: new poems) criticizes city planners’ prioritizing of Floor Space Ratio or FRS—
the plan? forgot
schools for our children to walk to.
that a community is more than FSR’s
more than pro-forma-s or
numbers
It is quite ironic that in Vancouver, people are expected to live in small, financially determined spaces, at both ends of the housing spectrum.
The lack of closing parenthesis in the title of “(IN THE NIGHTMARE OF NOMENCLATURE” alludes to the colonial ordeal of the naming and renaming the land without closure:
you need three million loonies to own this place
of many names and winds:
McLellan Forest East
Gray Pit Forest
Glen Valley East Forest
McLellan Park or
Samaaqua
as the Kwantlen First Nation called it.
New names are given in a bid for ownership, but as Elza points out,
more precisely this green sleeve of earth
already owns us.
Readers of SCAR/CITY will be moved by its tenacity and purpose in bringing poetic expression to the ongoing housing crisis in Vancouver. This collection reminds me of how heartbroken I am at the way Vancouver keeps prioritizing profit over human needs.
[Editor’s note: Daniela Elza will launch SCAR/CITY and her debut prose collection Is This an Illness or an Accident? at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on November 6, 7:30pm (Studio 103, 6450 Deer Lake Ave, Burnaby). She will also be part of the Fraser Valley Festival on November 8 with a workshop and a panel.]
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Jane Frankish lives in Vancouver and works at Vancouver Public Library. She writes poetry and prose and has published in SAPP zine, Emerge 24 anthology, and the Graduate Liberal Studies Journal. She has a Creative Writing Certificate from the Writer’s Studio (SFU), Master’s Degree in Liberal Studies (SFU), and Masters in Library and Information Studies (UBC). [Editor’s note: Jane has reviewed books by Pauline Le Bel, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Bruno Cocorocchio, Eileen Casey & Jeanne Cannizzo, and Jenny Boychuk for BCR. She has also published personal essays—”Chennai: A Place in Between” and “Letters from the Pandemic 16: Dear Percy”—in BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster