✍ Scribed by Solmaz Sharif
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Daily I sit
with the language
they've made
of our language
to NEUTRALIZE
the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMs
like you.
You are what is referred to as
a "CASUALTY."
--from "Personal Effects"
Solmaz Sharif's astonishing first book, Look , asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family's and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed in America's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discrimination endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.
At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms ; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. "Let it matter what we call a thing," she writes. "Let me look at you."
**
“Sharif defies power, silence, and categorization in this stunning suite. . . . In form, content, and execution, Sharif's debut is arguable the most noteworthy book of poetry yet about recent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the greater Middle East.”―** Publishers Weekly Starred Review **
“ Look is a book that disrupts, fervently and effectively. The poems within are allergic to complacency and linguistic hypnosis; they constantly reach, inquire, prod, and wonder―sometimes with force―and refuse to allow the reader to be lulled into the sense that everything is okay in the world.”―** The Rumpus**
“Raw, unsparing poems. . . . Highly recommended.”―** Library Journal Starred Review **
“There are few books, whether debuts or not, to more anticipated than the publication of Solmaz Sharif’s Look.*―Literary Hub *
“Sharif’s poems are rich with imagery; a single line of hers can tell an entire story.”*―Huffington Post *
“As heart-wrenching as they are intriguing, these highly anticipated poems are beautifully devastating.”*―BookTrib *
“Solmaz Sharif’s Look is something great. She throws us a brilliant, even perfect, book of poems sadly central to the nightmare of today.”―Eileen Myles
“By unearthing, decoding, and reconstructing half-hidden symbols of power built into nomenclature as well as everyday expression, the poet serves truth―sometimes delicately, other times brutally. . . . Each phrase pulls the reader into a system of being, personal and historical, and Look , line by line, extends toward prophecy and ('I am singing to her still') harmony.”―Yusef Komunyakaa
“Solmaz Sharif's beautiful and important poems patrol the boundaries and limits of language. . . . I can’t remember a more distinguished debut.”―Eavan Boland
“I haven’t been as excited about a first book of poetry for a long time as I am about Solmaz Sharif’s forthcoming Look. . . . This feels like an important book, not just a good one.”―David Baker
Solmaz Sharif has published poetry in The New Republic and Poetry , and has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
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