Forced from home,
separated from family,
children now behind barbed wire!

A Japanese American girl scans the dusty internment camp where everyone in her community has been taken during World War II, hoping for better days when they’ll finally be able to go home.

Decades later, a Latin American immigrant girl escaping with her family from bad conditions is taken to the same dusty internment camp, her hopes of better days now dimmed.

This reverso poem tells the two girls’ different/similar stories with a single set of phrases, like going up a musical scale and then back down.

“In this land of promise, we hoped to find a place to belong.” The phrase that begins the first poem ends the second poem.

“Where darkness is, light will shine again. From behind barbed wire, new life will begin.” The phrase that starts the second poem is the final line of the first.

Muted colors evoke the dreary setting of the camp, children and parents often separated by barbed wire, far away from pleasant places.

Fort Sill, Oklahoma, has long been a prison camp for those considered different, from Geronimo and his Chiricahua Apaches in the 1880s to Japanese Americans during World War II to immigrant children since 2014.

What keeps you hopeful in the face of such things?
**kmm

Book info: Barbed Wire Between Us / Mia Wenjen; illustrated by Violeta Encarnacion. Red Comet Press, 2026. [author site https://miawenjen.com/barbed-wire-between-us/] [illustrator site illustrator site https://www.instagram.com/violeta.encarnacion/] [publisher site https://www.redcometpress.com/picturebooks/barbed] Review copy and cover image courtesy of the publisher, via Publisher Spotlight.