Evacuations

"Evacuations by Kevin Irie doesn’t just take my breath away, it breathes into me with the scent of the Rocky mountains—Slocan, Bayfarm, Tashme, Lemon Creek, Sandon. It’s the ongoing womb and wound, the inhaling ex-haling of our JapaneseCanadianess." Joy Kogawa, author of Obasan
"For Japanese Canadians, the Second World War meant settlement, dispossession, internment and dispersal. In Evacuations, poet Kevin Irie examines this experience and uses traditional as well as innovative techniques to get at the core emotions of betrayal, grief and loss felt by many of those affected by this time in Canada’s history.... "[Evacuations] is deft and well wrought ... [exposing] the hypocrisy and shameful acts of a country whose government removed and incarcerated its own citizens based on their race." Sally Ito, Canada's History, May 15, 2026
"[Kevin Irie] makes good use of the poetic forms that have become established as part of the toolkit for interrogating archival and documentary evidence—in particular, variations on what is known as 'erasure poetry.'... Other poetic forms suited to remixing historical sources include the cento and the ekphrastic poem, both of which find their way into this collection.... Irie also writes elegantly in the lyric mode. His spare, controlled stanzas address incidents of blatant racism in the present day alongside evocations of the past." Dawn Macdonald, May 24, 2026 [Full post at https://reviewsofbooksigotforfreeorcheap.substack.com/p/kevin-iries-evacuations]