As our nation hovers at the precipice of change, anticipating our imminent political evolution, we ask ourselves what personal reincarnations should accompany this moment. Kathy Engel and Kamal Boullata, editors of We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon engage this very notion in their powerful anthology. Spanning over a quarter century of conflict in the Middle East, and forwarding the voices of sixty poets from multiple nations, this collection offers an intricate understanding of what it means to resist, to give birth to change, to create meaning out of astonishing political chaos and violence. In her introduction Engel writes, “We begin here. In the space between words. Our multilingual sounds affirm presence, conscience, memory.” It is this collective mission, the transformation of silence into sound, which positions these writers as disciples of language, testifying to the ability of stories to save lives.

True to his cutting subtitle, Buffalo State professor Lou Rera’s collection of flash fiction features a brood of abbreviated people we would be better off not becoming although, in all likelihood, they may surround us wherever we go anyway. But those who eagerly grab onto dark humor as contemporary critique will find here what ails them. Rera’s prose drips sardonic with not-too-subtle jabs at popular currents (“Art For Art’s Sake,” a thinly veiled send-up of the Chuck Closes of the art world), meaningless minimum-wage jobs (“Eating Crow,” “Spoiled Meat”), and everyday freakery (“Billy Darwin,” “Chocolate Chip Grief”). Running between the psychopathic and random apathy manifesting itself in various forms, right down to a sidewalk bystander calmly observing as an overweight man almost get run down by a careless SUV driver on her cellphone (“Hold the Peppers”), the fatal impulse of society’s worst lingers in clear view in each of these tales. Not to let the reader get so swallowed up, Rera does what he can to keep a laugh track close by, though this is a bleak rumpus he takes us along for with little chance of his characters escaping it. As the protagonist of “The Helmet” shows, even the possible salvations afoot, commercial or otherwise, are fraught at the outset with paranoiac danger: “The brochure that changed her life could also get her killed…. She now knew the invisible forces that bombarded every minute of her life, and she was terrified.”