Model Disciple

A mesmerising and moving first collection, this anthology gives us a poetry of two minds. Confounded by Japanese-Canadian legacies too painful to fully embrace, Michael Prior’s split speakers struggle to understand themselves as they submit to their reinvention: I am all that is wrong with the Old World / and half of what troubles the New. Prior emerges as a poet not of identity, but identities. Invented identities, double identities, provisional identities – his art always bearing witness to a sense of self held long enough to shed at a moment’s notice. Model Disciple ‘s Ovidean shape-shifting is driven by formal mastery and mot juste precision. It’s also one of the most commanding poetic debuts in years.