Wartime Measures: Poems

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.”