Although Lonny Kaneko has written in almost every genre, his new work is a collection of poetry, Coming Home From Camp and Other Poems. Lonny says that “the book is a wonderful opportunity for the poems to have a home. They’ve been disappearing a few at a time. When a computer goes down or some change in program happens, I will remember a poem and be unable to find it. So this set of poems will thankfully have a home.”
Lonny credits his publisher, Jean Davies Okimoto, with providing the opportunity to bring these poems together.
Given the title of the book, many of the poems revolve around Lonny’s experience of spending some of his youngest years in Minidoka, one of the incarceration camps that people of Japanese ancestry were forced to relocate to during World War II. When reflecting, Lonny has this to say:
“The camp experience is buried within us; we can’t rid ourselves of the memories and the effects it had on each of our lives. And of course, it affects people differently, but it shapes how we see ourselves and how we think others see us.”
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