Kirjahaku

The narrative of poetry and prose begins on the eve of Pearl Harbor. An old Croatian fisherman rows across Eagle Harbor on Bainbridge Island to light the kerosene lamps to guide the ferries in, as he does each night. Christmas lights decorate the cottages scattered around the harbor. The lights of Seattle glow to the east. A star falls "from the wayside of infinity."The next morning, a Sunday, brings the bombing of Pearl Harbor.The owners of the Bainbridge Island Review, Walt and Milly Woodward, work into the wee hours to publish a special edition. Walt Woodward reminds his neighbors, "I am positive every Japanese family on the Island has an intense loyalty for the United States of America and stands ready to defend it." Up and down the West Coast, however, hatred is stirring.Little more than two months later, President Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066 authorizing the removal of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast of the United States.On March 30, 1942, 227 Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island, under bayonet guard, are marched aboard the ferry Kehloken bound for Seattle and a train waiting to take them to Manzanar, a barbed-wire camp in the central California desert. Many of their island neighbors turned out to see them off. Not a few of them weep.The author, using historical sources and family recollections, has crafted a poetic narrative of one of the most conspicuous injustices in American history, and explores how the healing goes on.

Mike Dillon's Nocturne: New & Selected Poems, features his best work from six books of poetry, two poetry chapbooks, and three books of haiku. In That Which We Have Named he writes: eyes that long for the windless/light of Heaven must, in the end/show proof of earth. This quest for ultimate things grounded in daily life is the common thread running through all of Dillon's books. Along the way, the poet's eye swerves to the margins, away from the crowd, to find a patch of sunlit moss, or a fleeting moment of silence. A tender regard for the marginalized is captured in this much-celebrated haiku: the last kid picked/running his fastest/to right field.Dillon grew up on Bainbridge Island, west of Seattle. His Departures: Poetry and Prose on the Removal of Bainbridge Island's Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor, evokes the tragedy and heroism of that time, delivered with the terse evocation, sharp detailing, and devastating humanity of a Netsuke carving. It was written during the rise of Trumpism.Across Agate Pass from Bainbridge Island lies the Suquamish reservation, burial place of Chief Seattle. For a middle-class white boy, Suquamish was a source of mystery and wonder, opening a door to another dimension: A white marble cross, flanked by two cedar poles, /marks the great chief's grave, /his feet aimed east, he writes in Suquamish and Other Poems.Mike Dillon's poetic quest searches for the crossroads of time and eternity, where the world appears as glimmering immanence.