A fierce meditation on the intimate costs of state violence—grief, inheritance, and "how to caretake what remains."
Drawing on his own family history, Michael Prior’s third collection examines the legacies of the dispossession, displacement, and incarceration of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Here, the landscapes of British Columbia are haunted by both the beauty of Japanese sumi-e paintings and the terror of state violence, while history "flicker[s] through / the slanting thicket / like words whispered / to be misheard / in a classroom game/of telephone."
In language at once sonorous and precise, Wartime Measures asks what can be written "that won't make miniatures of grief," and reckons with questions about authenticity, elegy, generational memory, and the self, measuring the moments when "light” aligns “with shadow, was with is.”
MICHAEL PRIOR is a yonsei poet, teacher, and editor. He is the author of two previous collections of poems: Burning Province, which won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the B.C. & Yukon Book Prizes' Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; and Model Disciple, which was named one of the best books of the year by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has received fellowships from the Amy Clampitt Residency, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Jerome Foundation, and Hawthornden Literary Retreat. Prior edits the Véhicule Press poetry imprint, Signal Editions, and his poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, PN Review, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series. He divides his time between Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches at Macalester College, and Vancouver, B.C.
