Beginning less than two months after the attacks of 9/11, the forty-seven poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky's Shadow War, Volume Two depict the United States in crisis. There's a general suspicion that al-Qa'eda is behind the crash of an American Airlines flight in Queens and the attempt, by Richard Reed (a.k.a. the "Shoe Bomber" ), to blow up another, from Paris to Miami, and the fact that Osama bin Laden still can't be found makes this paranoia all the more credible.