small canvases, her ambitions are large; she uses wide-angle lenses, and her feet cover vast tracts of landscape, roving from sharply delineated details of objects at hand to remembrances from her childhood , stamped in her personal geographies in Sudan, England, India, and the US. In addition, she draws from Hindu, Christian, and other mythologies to offer literary and historical precedents as textual testimonies. Her favored spots are sites of carnage, violence, and death. These images are slung at readers at a velocity that makes them duck for cover. They may flinch, but she will not spare them from facing what she has witnessed. Atmospheric Embroidery is divided into five sections, leading off with the header “Fragments in Praise of the Book,” naming what is to follow: “Book of alphabets burnt so that truth can be told.” The lyrical impulse is strong here, and I feel it should be allowed more play in her poetry. It would also counterbalance the angst-ridden world she has so assiduously cultivated in book after book. “Aesthetic Knowledge” offers another lovely example of sensory touches: “landscape becomes us . . . an interior space bristling with light”; “tears from the domes, like droplets of milk”; “gold leaf pasted on paper / Utterly fragile.” The reference in the title poem is to Alighiero Boetti’s artwork The Thousand Longest Rivers, but the connections among “Wads of ice-cream glisten on Route 6,” “fissures in magma,” and “Season of snipers in the heartland” remain unclear. Obscurities cloud “Children of the House” even as “Ars Poetica” and “Tarawood” create magic and beauty. A fine example of how an authentic political poem ought to be written is “Moksha II,” about the Delhi woman raped by six men in a moving bus. Alexander reworks old material in new contexts. The Indian Ocean blues and Darfur poems revisit her crossings of the Indian Ocean since the age of five. The poems in the Darfur section were inspired by drawings by children who lived in the refugee camps. Scattered pieces of life are crystallized in univocity. Alexander has also remained faithful to her signature technique and style: the language and syntax in the symbolic space of the poems mirrors the fractured, torn, wounded, and disjointed reality of the world and our shared life, and the poems serve as devices to force the reader to confront this world. Saleem Peeradina Siena Heights University Aleš Debeljak. Smugglers. Brian Henry, tr. Rochester, New York. BOA Editions. 2015. 108 pages. Slovenian poet Aleš Debeljak’s new bilingual volume, Smugglers, contains five cycles and four nonrhymed quatrains. Each of the individual poems pulses with emotional intensity inspired by various streets and squares of the poet’s hometown of Ljubljana —its bars, cinemas, or cemeteries—with dedications to close friends and writers from the former Yugoslavia. In the map of Smugglers, intertextual references function as explicit quotes. The unique tone of the collection approaches prose diction, with lightning-like associative leaps characteristic of Debeljak’s use of poetic images. These quotes and dedications appear as markers with which the reader gets back to an old private or political story of the urban chronicle of Ljubljana or any other city. The lyrical voice intuitively summons it as a witness of the moments that link the poet’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood to the present era: “I was there; if you want, / call it a place of private memory, if you want, the end of the road.” Nostalgia for a former life thus turns into nostalgia for all such persons, places, and situations that shaped the poet’s personal identity but also the anguish and Ali al-Muqri Hurma T. M. Aplin, tr. Darf Hurma, meaning sanctity in Arabic, serves as the female protagonist of this novel, indicating immediately the paradoxical position of women in Yemen, where they are seen as sacred objects and as inferior beings. While discussing this controversial topic, Ali al-Muqri creates a real and psychologically complex character who defies the limitations of her name. Sinéad Morrissey Parallax Farrar, Straus & Giroux The unique metaphors around which Sinéad Morrissey constructs many of her poems also contain a classic character that remind one of metaphysical poets such as Donne...