Additional information
by Michael Prior (Author)
Acerbic, moving, and formally astonishing, Michael Prior's second collection explores the enduring impact of the Japanese internment upon his family legacy and his mixed-race identity.
Canada-Japan Literary Award, WinnerDorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Winner
Raymond Souster Award, Shortlist Amid the record-breaking wildfires that scorched British Columbia in 2015 and 2017, the poems in this collection move seamlessly between geographical and psychological landscapes, grappling with cultural trauma and mapping out complex topographies of grief, love, and inheritance: those places in time marked by generational memory "when echo crosses echo."
Burning Province is an elegy for a home aflame and for grandparents who had a complex relationship to it--but it is also a vivid appreciation of mono no aware: the beauty and impermanence of all living things. "The fireflies stutter like an apology," Prior writes; "I would be lying to you / if I didn't admit I love them."
Author Biography
MICHAEL PRIOR is a writer and a teacher. His most recent poetry collection, Burning Province, won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. His first book of poems, Model Disciple, was named one of the best books of the year by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, The Margins, PN Review, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, among other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, the Jerome Foundation, and Hawthornden Literary Retreat, Prior holds graduate degrees from the University of Toronto and Cornell University. He divides his time between Saint Paul, M.N. and Vancouver, B.C.
