Crossroad Mirror: Poems

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.

HUSSAIN AHMED is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist and author of Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile and Blue Exodus. He is the winner of the 2024 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and the 2024 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, and his poems have been featured in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere.