Evacuations

Irie draws from historical documents and uses their language through either erasure or highlighting techniques to create new poems. Take the language of “notices,” as in the poem “Notice to All Persons of Japanese Racial Origin”; all the text of the original government notice is there, with certain words bolded. Some of those words are then repeated at the end of the poem to form the line “The Duty of Justice Is to Force Any Peace to Retain Any Power.” Irie employs this technique again to parse out poems from field-guide descriptions of plants that Japanese Canadians typically foraged for in internment camps, such as butterbur, burdock and fiddleheads. The plants are familiar to me, except I first knew them by their Japanese names: fuki, gobo and zenmai. My Nisei great-aunt often spoke of foraging for these items during her internment at the Popoff camp in British Columbia, a site also mentioned in Evacuations. Irie skilfully incorporates the guides’ language to denote the populations of people, not plants, in his poems, playing off words such as “invasive” and “whitewash.”

Overall, this book of poetry is deft and well wrought. It’s readable and dexterous in its use of forms and language to expose the hypocrisy and shameful acts of a country whose government removed and incarcerated its own citizens based on their race.