Crossroad Mirror

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.