Fasting for Ramadan is structured as a chronicle of daily meditations, during two cycles of the 30-day rite of daytime abstinence required by Ramadan for purgation and prayer. Estranged in certain ways from his family’s cultural traditions when he was younger, Ali has in recent years re-embraced the Ramadan ritual, and brings to this rediscovery an extraordinary delicacy of reflection, a powerfully inquiring mind, and the linguistic precision and ardor of a superb poet.

In 1953, Yoko Ono wrote a score called “Secret Piece,” an open-ended formula for musical performance in a forest at daybreak. Beginning with this invitation to creation, and using essays, diary entries, prose maps, and verse fragments, Kazim Ali marks a path through quantum physics, sixth-century Chola Empire sculptures, the challenges of literary translation and of climate change, and destruction of a priceless set of handmade flutes by airport security. Amid shards from far-flung histories and geographies he finds the cosmos.

Splintering like light in a prism, the poems of Jorge Aulicino combine images of the Dirty War in Argentina, of historic Latin American independence struggles, and of the battles against fascism in Europe. Translated into English for the first time by poet Judith Filc working closely with Aulicino, this influential book (published in Spanish in 2008) is filled with the experiences of a grandson of European immigrants now chronicling a world where multitudinous cities are cracking under their own weight in an ongoing present whose common denominator is war. Testifying for the migrating masses he has called “pariahs of empire,” who traverse a globe with no stable borders, Aulicino’s lyrical “I” shifts between roles, exile or spy or reporter taking detailed notes.