The poems in "Passenger" shift between the mythology of the Middle East and the bombed-out cities of the former Yugoslavia, the ancient Roman tale of Romulus and Remus, the choreography of murder, and the hawking of grisly war memorabilia on destroyed city streets. Influenced by Susan Maxwell's experiences as a relief worker in a Croatian refugee camp at the height of the Bosnian War in the 1990s, these poems document a nameless, mythological war that has collapsed the boundaries between contemporary and ancient history and between personal memory and folklore. The poems' tender voices wake to find themselves fused to objects or to the dead, and begin to speak those first precarious, childlike, and prophetic words that will allow them to reestablish contact with the outside world--a world that has become "one / sentence long repeating so the last chain / could sing while it murdered the first."

SUSAN MAXWELL earned her BA in Peace and Conflict studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been featured in such publications as Verse, American Letters & Commentary, Fence, VOLT, and River City Magazine, and she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2004 for the poem "Plural for Tree at the Forested Edge." Maxwell currently resides in Oakland, California.