Alan Gilbert
Stars have always provided direction for long-range travelers, whether by land or by sea. Until relatively recently, even modern ships used them to navigate. The stars have inspired entire civilizations, technologies, and literatures; conversely, peoples and cultures have been destroyed by their guidance. How else would Christopher Columbus have reached the Americas? Perhaps appropriately, given its title, Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s second book of poems, Heaven, makes numerous references to the day and night sky: “ . . . that star-beleaguered dome, that void, / Where giants moved against the blinding backdrop.” It imagines that realm as very much real, very 
Former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein’s first appearance in the historical record occurs in 1959, as a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored would-be assassin of Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim. Years later, Hussein, after becoming Iraq’s president in 1979, would commit a number of the same missteps that finally led to Qasim’s downfall: threatening Kuwaiti sovereignty, alienating Iraq from its Arab neighbors, and not making the country’s oil reserves more accessible to Western nations. Hussein missed (literally: he was one of the triggermen) in his attempt to kill Qasim. But after Iraq’s Baath Party overthrew Qasim in 1963 (again with CIA