The Empire's Missing Links explores a world familiar to readers of Walid Bitars 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, Bitars 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 Bitars darkest, most daring book yet.