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Children in Tactical Gear offers a brilliant feed of stark incantations and unsparing satire. Set in distinctly American landscapes, including toy weapon assembly lines and the compounds of the super rich, and voiced by imperiled children, failed adults, and even a smart home speaker, this collection demonstrates the unsettling force of a surreal imagination under duress.
 

In his first full-length translation, celebrated poet John Murillo (Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Four Quartets Prize) brings Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels (Sobre los ángeles) to an English-reading audience. Murillo’s foreword introduces Sobre los ángeles as “a monument—albeit a severely neglected monument—of early twentieth-century literature.” Despite having “penned a masterwork of social and psychic malaise as deserving as any of its place in the global canon,” Alberti has disappeared into relative obscurity among readers of English language poetry, and Murillo’s crucial intervention allows the Spanish poet’s voice to once again echo prophetically from this book’s opening poem, “Paradise Lost”: “throughout the centuries, / through the nothingness of the world, / I, without sleep, search for you.” Insofar as the speaker addresses a figure named Shadow, he also seems to imagine us, his future readers, who need these prescient lyrics written in the time leading up to Spain’s civil war and ensuing decades of fascist rule. Bringing his signature gifts to translating from the Spanish, Murillo has given new life to what many consider Alberti’s magnum opus and delivered our marching orders for the resistance the future will require. “It is time you gave me your hand / and scratched into me the little light that catches a hole as it closes / and killed for me this evil word I plan to plunge into the thawing earth.” 
 

War and its reverberations propel people across the Nigerian landscape in Hussain Ahmed’s third collection

In Crossroad Mirror many poems begin after sundown—in quiet moments when the bounds between the past and the present, the living and the dead, blur.  War and its aftershocks often form the backdrop for these scenes, though Ahmed’s verse rarely brings us to the battlefield itself. Instead, we hear the stories of refugees, civilian casualties, and ordinary soldiers trying to make sense of their circumstances. “There’s no vocabulary in the army—for grief, or death,” writes Ahmed. “Each door you exit, leads to another parade ground.” A group of soldiers wait out a rainstorm—and the war—together in a tent. Their families linger by the radio and listen for news. The “missing” loom as large as the dead.

Tracing the threads of migration that war so often catalyzes, Crossroad Mirror takes us from grassland to cornfield to coastline and explores the role storytelling and spirituality play in leaving and grieving.