The Empire's Missing Links explores a world familiar to readers of Walid Bitar's previous three books: a world where language is never simple, where the most ordinary words are weapons used against us in the play for private and public power. Resembling a series of unflinchingly ambivalent, and often jarringly enigmatic, history lessons, Bitar's new poems are rich in original observations about our contemporary unease. The effect, in the end, is of a single wandering monologue, its 21st century sense of crisis encoded in unpredictable quatrains whose evasiveness is always in step with lapidary plainness and metaphorical surprise. The Empire's Missing Links is Bitar's darkest, most daring book yet.

Walid Bitar has previously published three other books of poetry: Maps with Moving Parts (Brick Books), Guys on Holy Land (Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England), and Bastardi Puri (The Porcupine `s Quill). He has also been published in four anthologies, including The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Signal Editions/VÈhicule Press) and in journals across Canada and the United States. He was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lives in Toronto.

Walid Bitar's profile page