CANR

• Look: Poems Graywolf Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2016

• Solmaz Sharif Home Page - https://solmazsharif.com/

  Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness, and others. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, scholarships the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an NEA fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship. She has most recently been selected to receive a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award as well as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is currently a lecturer at Stanford University. Her first poetry collection, LOOK, published by Graywolf Press in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/07/27/the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif/

  The Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif
  By Zinzi Clemmons July 27, 2016
  AT WORK

  In 2014, I heard Solmaz Sharif read “Look,” the title poem from her debut collection. Look inserts military terminology into intimate scenes between lovers, refashioning hollow, bureaucratic language from the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms with a human touch. (Even the collection’s title has an alternate military meaning: per the Department of Defense, a look means “a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of influence.”) At a time when the U.S. automates acts of murder, Sharif insists that war is still personal—perhaps today more than ever. In one of its most quoted passages, she writes, “Daily I sit / with the language / they’ve made / of our language / to NEUTRALIZE / the CAPABILITY OF LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS / like you.”

  “By simply placing words from the Defense dictionary in small caps, and deploying them in scenes of intimacy,” John Freeman wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Sharif has begun the process of renaturing them, putting them in the readers’ hands for examination.” Look confirms what I’ve known since 2014: Sharif is poised to influence not only literature but larger conversations about America, war, and the Middle East. I spoke with her about her influences, the role of the poet in today’s world, and the stories behind Look.

  INTERVIEWER

  In an essay you wrote for the Kenyon Review, you said, “When I am asked to describe my poetry on airplane flights, at dinner parties, I describe it first as ‘political.’ Then, ‘documentary.’ And these two things seem to, for some, preclude aesthetic rigor.” There’s a popular conception that overtly political can’t have aesthetic value—that a political message degrades the aesthetics. Is your work a deliberate effort to rebut this notion?

  SHARIF

  Clichéd, bad writing often means clichéd, bad politics, and vice versa. Aesthetics and politics have a really vital and exciting give-and-take between them. I think June Jordan is an exciting example. She was politically astute and radical, but she was also a classically trained pianist, so when you’re reading her work, it’s incredibly music driven and decided. It’s exciting for me to think of poets that are allowing their politics to also be shaped by these aesthetic considerations, and wondering when the poetic will lead you to the kind of political surprise that a dogmatic approach wouldn’t allow. These are the artists that live on the fringes of what is aesthetically and politically accepted.

  When I say “living on the fringes,” I’m thinking of Edward Said’s idea of the “exilic” intellectual pursuit. It’s this artistic presence continually outside, questioning and speaking back to whatever supposed “here” or “we” or “now” we’ve created. The word fringe is belittling in a way I don’t intend—I mean a nomadic presence, or a mind that is consistently on the run, and preventing these political moments from calcifying.

  INTERVIEWER

  I’m interested in how your family came to the United States, and how you experienced the country as an Iranian immigrant.

  SHARIF

  The dominant narrative of Iranian exile or displacement in the U.S. is one that’s about people who were supporters of the Shah, who was a dictator, and were forced to leave after the Shah was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution. That’s not the only narrative, though. My parents were students in the U.S. in the late seventies, and as the revolution picked up steam, they went back home to Iran, and left again in 1983, and I was born en route out of the country. We moved to Texas so my dad could finish his studies there, and then we moved to Birmingham, Alabama, so my mom could finish her Bachelor’s there, and finally we ended up in Los Angeles when I was in sixth grade. It was the first place I lived that had a sizable Iranian population. There’s actually an Iranian population in Birmingham, but LA has the largest outside of Iran. At that time, it felt dominated by upper-class, well-to-do Iranians who were more into assimilation than my family or I was. I felt immediately ostracized by this group in middle school, when I came. I don’t mean to make it sound like everyone was rich—they weren’t. We weren’t. There are many different Iranian presences in Los Angeles, but I just didn’t have access to them.

  No matter where I went, I was outside of whatever community I found myself in, so that even when I arrived in a place where there was a lot of “me,” I was totally outside again. That probably influenced my artistic impulse—to go back to the exilic intellectual—to stand outside of and look into, and constantly question and interrogate the collectives that exist. It’s easy for me because I’ve never felt a part of any of them in a real way.

  It’s been important for me to write down as many narratives as I can, other narratives around the Iranian Revolution and the Iranian presence in the U.S., and also the possibility for Iranians to build coalitions with other Third World groups, as Iranians did in the seventies and eighties. That’s the community I come out of. There’s also a rift that happens between first and second generations, because the second generation has woken up to the fact that assimilation is not just a matter of your accent or class or education—there’s an “in” that you’ll never be in because of who you are.

  There’s a lot of anti-Black, anti-Arab, anti-Indian, and anti-Pakistani—and on and on—racism within the Iranian community. But my experience is one of obvious allyship between these communities. I’m more interested in what brings us together and what our nearnesses are, but this can sort of dumbfound some members of the Iranian community. When I was sixteen, I went to this Iranian feminist conference, and Angela Davis was the key speaker. She referred to us all there as “women of color,” and some of the women in the older generation were squirming in their seats. It was the first time I’d heard the term, and I thought, that’s it. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to name. Whatever struggle is deemed optional or needs to be postponed, that’s my community. But that statement didn’t make too many people happy at the time.

  INTERVIEWER

  Look, to me, has a very female point of view. Women’s relationship to combat—though it’s changing with the evolution of war itself—is usually more oblique. We often play more supportive roles, though our experience is no less devastating. Is there significance to approaching war and surveillance as a woman?

  SHARIF

  Before I was even a poet, when I studied sociology, what I wanted to look at were media representations of women—Palestinian women in the New York Times, for example. How are women described by media, or by state-sponsored language, in warfare, and how is that representation used to justify state-sponsored violence? Women are often purposefully brought into descriptions of what war is—to justify the rescue of a nation, or to justify its decimation by showing its entire people as despicable or threatening, for example. By default, war seems to be just what happens to men on the front lines, during wartime. The boundaries of warfare—who it affects and who it doesn’t, and for how long—are very much divided along gendered lines, historically. I definitely wanted to challenge those lines.

  INTERVIEWER

  The book’s power is in its observations of the long-term effects of wars on individuals and families—some of its less-discussed casualties. I think part of the reason you’re able to take this view is because you’re a woman.

  SHARIF

  I think you’re right. There’s the old personal-is-political adage. But then, to be a woman is also to know that your body and your self and your mind are subject to and delimited by power at every turn, even in your own house, in your own lovemaking. There is no part of your life that has not been somehow violently decided for you by a narrative that was established before you were even born. This is not only true for women, right? It cuts across various identity strata—queerness, race, class, ability, et cetera.

  But to have that sense of precarity or vulnerability questioned and challenged by misdirection—for example, when you’re told that you’re overreacting, that what you think is going on isn’t actually happening—this is how the U.S. largely deals with warfare. They say, The war is no longer happening on this block, what are you talking about? That’s something that’s natural to my experience as a woman, and something that seems necessary to expose over and over again. I want to talk about how far-reaching these effects are and how intimate these effects are and how there’s no part of our bodies or desires that are not somehow informed or violated by these atrocities. This is a conversation that began with my own gender.

  Audre Lorde’s essay on erotics was a huge influence on me. When she talks about the erotic as a dark feminine power, that’s an argument that could be made here, but I’m not as comfortable making that argument myself anymore. I think all of these questions—what is femininity, what is darkness—and I’m so up in the air about them myself that I don’t really know what to say, other than that I feel, as a person and especially as a woman, that I am under constant threat and attack, and it’s not just me that’s happening to. Somehow, I want the work to show that every time you’re washing the dishes, every shower, every grocery trip—that’s all informed by this violence, whether we’re seeing it or not.

  INTERVIEWER

  There’s a constant awareness of surveillance in your work—in one poem, you mention that you start every phone call by saying, “Hello, NSA.”

  SHARIF

  The U.S.’s surveillance capabilities are not lost on me, and we’re pretty aware of this history—or maybe we’re not, actually. It’s definitely been in my awareness over the course of writing this book, and it’s something I did want to highlight. When we think of political repression, for example, or of a police state, we think of something that just happens abroad in Eastern European countries, or in Iran, whereas I understand America as the nation of COINTELPRO. How do we realize, again, that all of our lives, no matter who we are, are being surveilled, some more than others, and that we’re living in an increasingly repressive environment? How do we realize that whatever we see to be happening “there” has already happened “here”?

  INTERVIEWER

  The poems in Look are united thematically—the majority of these poems include rewritings of terms from the Department of Defense dictionary. I find this kind of conceptual project very interesting. Did you set out to write your first book in this way, or did it morph over the course of writing?

  SHARIF

  It became much larger than I anticipated, and I had to just stop it, basically, because it’s a conceptual frame that could continue ad infinitum, which is true of a lot of conceptual practices. I did not know it was going to be what it is. I discovered the dictionary in 2006, and it was another year or two until I actually started using it. I thought I was just going to write one poem that deals with the dictionary—then I realized I could write a whole book in response. As soon as I realized that, I started looking at other books that do similar work. M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! was a huge influence. That came in a later iteration of the manuscript. Later, too, I was directed to Code Poems by Hannah Weiner. Earlier on, there was Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. Martha Collins’s Blue Front invited and encouraged a more personal narrative. With each discovery, the manuscript would shift in response—I’d think, This has already been done, or, I haven’t tried this thing yet, I didn’t realize I could do this. It started as a rewrite of the dictionary, and wanting to redefine the terms to reveal the truth beneath the terms. It then evolved into revealing those terms as a part of our lives everywhere, daily in the U.S. I think the last major piece that went into it was the long elegy, “Personal Effects,” that I wrote for my uncle, and that was probably when I thought that it was pretty much done. That was the last major piece the book needed.

  INTERVIEWER

  I’ve seen you mention June Jordan over and over in interviews. I know that you studied in her Poetry for the People (P4P) program at UC Berkeley and list it as a huge influence in your development as a poet. I came across this quote from her—

  The task of a poet of color, a black poet, as a people hated and despised, is to rally the spirit of your folks … I have to get myself together and figure out an angle, a perspective, that is an offering, that other folks can use to pick themselves up, to rally and to continue or, even better, to jump higher, to reach more extensively in solidarity with even more varieties of people to accomplish something.

  Can you talk a little about the program and why it was so important to you? What do you think your role is, as a poet?

  SHARIF

  There’s this vein of self-affirmation that runs through that generation of radical poets—this need to define and affirm a collective identity that is otherwise despised. That’s actually one place where I feel I split off. Maybe it’s a generational thing, maybe it’s just because I think of poetry, right now, at least, in the way Dunya Mikhail, the Iraqi poet, described it—as diagnostic, rather than curative. I think June was a poet of vision, and I think that I’m more reflective. I haven’t quite gotten to that moment of vision yet. I just trust and know that certain lives need to be looked at very closely, and need to be grieved, and need to be considered—and affirmed, I guess.

  The P4P program was the most rigorous education I’ve ever received. It’s an amazing pedagogical model that June Jordan set up after decades of teaching. My understanding is that she was teaching an African American poetry course in the African American Studies department at Berkeley, and a women’s poetry course in what was then the Women’s Studies department, and she’d walk into these classrooms, and one class would be predominantly African American men reading African American poets, and the women’s studies classroom was predominantly white women reading women poets separately. She thought, These two classes need to be in the same room, and they need to be talking to each other. That’s how she came up with P4P, which was housed in the African American Studies department.

  Each year, the program would focus on three different ethnic groups that we would have to learn to somehow define and describe a history of. When I took the class, it was one of the few—if not the only—class that was teaching Arab and Arab American poetry on campus. She started doing that right after the first Gulf War started.

  As a student, you were in a class that you’re co-teaching with other undergraduate students and members of the community. You see a poetry that’s not being taught, and that you yourself know zero about, and instead of just lamenting that you’ll never have the expertise, you just figure it out. You read as much as you can, and you get up in front of the class and give a lecture. Maybe you fail publicly, but it has to be done. When you see work that’s not being done, you go and you do it. You don’t wait for someone else to.

  I haven’t really seen a model that is so pedagogically complete and radical anywhere. It was her attempt at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beloved Community.” It was the closest I’ve gotten, for sure.

  INTERVIEWER

  Jordan was all about building multicultural alliances. I wonder how you, as an Iranian American, interact with the various racial justice movements in America that—at least at the moment—are dominated by discussions of anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism.

  SHARIF

  I think we need to be very, very specific in naming the racism, the multiplicity of racisms, we face. Meaning anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, for example, must be named and highlighted. This does not preclude my own involvement or visibility as an Iranian American, and I shouldn’t be the measure by which this conversation is had, anyway. I think the more specific we are, the more inevitable it becomes to see the relationship between various powers. If we are naming the arrest of black men without charge and without trial, for example, well, I have something to add to that, something that wouldn’t be added if the conversation remained “we all face racism.” The more specific we become, the more obvious the relationship between these oppressions, the more dangerous and visionary the conversation.

  You ask about movements. I do want to step back for a moment and say I believe all action is political, and poetry is an action, so I believe poetry is political, period. I have a hard time, though, saying that my poetry is activist, or that poetry in general is activist. For me there’s an important distinction to be made. I don’t want to front. As political as my work might be, and as much as I might be thinking about how these things play out globally, as much as I might think or write about anti-Black or anti-Latinx racism, I haven’t been to a meeting in a long time. That’s the most direct way I can put it.

  Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel, What We Lose, is forthcoming from Viking. She currently serves as deputy editor for Phoneme Media, and lives in Los Angeles.

• Kenyan Review - http://www.kenyonreview.org/conversation/solmaz-sharif/

  SOLMAZ SHARIF

  SharifcarouselSolmaz Sharif is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University where she is working on a poetic rewrite of the U.S. Department of Defense’s dictionary. A 2011 winner of the Boston Review/Discovery Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in jubilat, DIAGRAM, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and others. Her poem “Personal Effects” appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of The Kenyon Review.

  Tell us a little about your KR piece. How was it written? What was the hardest part about writing it?

  I’ve been working on a poetic rewrite of the US Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms for several years now. My own experience as an Iranian born in Turkey beneath the long shadow of the Iran-Iraq War has always been an impetus behind this project. As an Iranian abroad, this experience was quintessentially American—the warfare was happening over there. Less American, perhaps, was being from the there. Regardless, the being from an elsewhere forced me to cultivate an image, as many have, of the home they left. An imagined place. This imagination-building happened to coincide with a war that killed 1,000,000 people. My father’s brother, a draftee, was one of those killed, shortly before I was born. I have often wondered about him—his taste in food, his crushes, his bikes—and had tried many times to write about him, resulting in many failures.

  A few nights before I left for a winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, my father pulled a slim album from his sock drawer. It contained a couple dozen photographs that my uncle had on his person while he was on the frontline. Most of the pictures were of him— posing with other soldiers, interrupting a phone call his mother wanted to make. Interesting, I thought, to want to see and carry yourself, more than your friends and family, around with you as you were sent to the front.

  A sociologist by training, I turn most things into research projects. First, I looked into the Iran-Iraq war, from Wikipedia entries to a cache of photos of veterans a family friend (and historian) was generous enough to pass along. Then I looked into photography as a medium—Barthes, Sontag, down to Errol Morris’s latest. Then, I remembered I was working on an elegy, so I read as many of those as I could—Tennyson’s “In Memorium,” Shelley’s “Adonais,” Milton’s “Lycidas,” Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” alongside Mark Doty’s Atlantis, Susan Howe’s That This, Denise Levertov’s The Sorrow Dance. Mark Doty’s work led me to Beethoven’s “Grosse Fugue,” which joined Alizadeh’s “Bi To Besar Nemishavad” and Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” as the soundtrack to composing the piece. I’m not a composer and I don’t have a musical vocabulary, but it did feel musical or cinematic the way I was trying to teach myself to weigh and wed so that the whole piece, now twenty pages (though it varied from two to fifty), developed a discernible syntax. With seven undisturbed months in a mostly-shut-down town at the end of the world, I had the luxury of accumulating and adding all the languages and materials essential to the sociohistorical narrative that subsumed my uncle. I got to write page after page in notebooks, narrowed them into ones worth typing, then narrowed those into ones worth placing next to each other, weighted with stones from the nearby harbor. A ramshackle, beach-combed altar of language debris I hoped would bring me closer to him.

  I didn’t meet the ultimate goal, to speak to or at least to get to know my uncle; that was the hardest part. In fact, the more I looked at the photos, the more I handled the materials, the more I objectified him and trained myself, as I say in the piece, “to ignore it.” I read pieces in progress for a reading at the FAWC. Later that night, I had an emotional breakdown. I’d heard recently, secondhand, of a war photojournalist who photographed the unearthing of Saddam era mass graves in Iraq, as families attempted to identify members by clothing scraps, accessories, anything that had survived decay. He said, I am told, that he shot and shot and when he let the camera fall on its strap, he finally saw where he was, he finally saw what and whom he was photographing. He cried. The hardest part is putting the camera down.

  What have you learned about the writing process in the last five years?

  Most of it is typical: don’t be a perfectionist, write, write everyday. I am at my best, I feel guilty to say, when I write for thirty minutes every morning. That gives me more material than I can tame. I’m surprised to find that in addition to empathy, my writing requires a callousness. Maybe this is the nature of the material I immerse myself in—mostly testimony of warfare and imprisonment. Maybe this is the nature of the craft—that putting language, putting music first requires a kind of violence.

  Apart from this one–can you share with us the literary magazines you most look forward to reading, and why?

  I’m drawn to Lana Turner and jubilat, because they consistently publish some of my favorite living poets and that makes me trust the people they introduce. I follow Poetry, skipping excitedly to the letters to the editor. I also read US Weekly. But I have to say, I have a fantasy of starting a literary journal that is only made of work that has been rejected by other literary journals, so that each issue would be a shadow of an existing journal. It would be called something like The Others or The Rejects or Vulture and there would be a New Yorker shadow issue, for example. This is my primary obsession in general: what is missing? Who? I just need to figure out how to do this without turning editors against me.

  Philip Larkin has a great short essay on writing called “The Pleasure Principle.” In it, he sketches three stages of writing a poem. The steps begin like this: “the first (stage) is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it.” Are his stages germane to your writing process, and what you try to make when you write? Would you amend Larkin’s stages?

  Larkin’s notion makes me lament my loss of Farsi because with it I lost the non-gendered third-person pronoun. So my immediate response to reading this proclamation is that, well, clearly it’s not me Larkin is taking into account. And then, of course, I think, Solmaz, just stick to what he’s saying conceptually. He seems to invoke a linearity that isn’t convincing. Is this a poet retreating into his own obsessions, returning and shaping some wisdom, that is then consumed for generations to come? Sure, some poets and poems will work that way. When it comes to my DOD poems, many times the terms in the dictionary are what spark the poems, though I guess one could argue the original emotional concept, namely wanting to interdict the obliteration of language and bodies, still came first. My view in general—of history, of art-making—is not a progressive one, as these stages read to me, but more dialectical. On a smaller scale, I am not certain an emotional concept exists purely separate from verbal device—not even, perhaps, in one given, individual mind. Even at its most private, it’s in conversation with the world. To feel, upon reading a poem I wrote, exactly what I felt first, is impossible. My feelings as the poet are not the only way to feel reading the poem, nor should they be. I do hope my poems are felt.

  In the 1950’s, John Crowe Ransom invited a coterie of critics (William Empson, Northrop Frye, etc.) to write a “credo” for The Kenyon Review. The results became an essay series by 10 leading critics on their core beliefs regarding literature and the critical practice, entitled “My Credo.” What would you include in your own credo on the practice of writing? What core beliefs do you have regarding literature and books?

  Write the last poem you will ever write. Then wait a while and write it again. The books should be worth burning.

  Tell us about a teacher (“teacher” construed broadly!) who has been important to your writing.

  Throughout my undergrad at UC Berkeley, I worked with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, which, at the time, felt like the whole world. Now I see how rare, how valuable that space was. Though June Jordan died the first year I took the course, it is structured to be taught by “Student Teacher Poets,” often themselves undergraduate students at Cal. Even today, these three identities, publicly and privately, feel to me inseparable. The class was one of the most rigorous I’ve ever taken. For instance, no one is offering a class on Native Hawaiian poetry. Well, then, you better put one together and know your stuff well enough to lecture on it before 150 students in a fully accredited university course, you nineteen-year old you. It was challenging and invigorating and I owe a lot to my co-teachers and all the visiting poets (from Bei Dao to Haas Mroue to Ruth Forman). Most of all, the Student Teacher Poet who taught me: marcos ramírez. Who so venerated our time together, he chewed out a woman who wandered in absentmindedly and interrupted our first session with a verve that made me make sure not to cross him. Who would make me produce double-digit revisions of a poem as though there was no other way it was supposed to happen. Who taught me it’s all an experiment. Who in workshop constantly spoke the word “risk.” Who gave me Mahmoud Darwish and the Misty Poets and Leonel Rugama and Milton. Who gave me June stories about her driving, her laugh, the poets she chewed out. Who scared the living lights out of me. Who, when I ditched class certain I was going to drop it and never again share a poem with another soul, called my dorm room and left me a message saying the last poem I sheepishly turned in to him (and only him) I was going to have to read to the whole class as an example, as an example to myself. Who with one phone call changed the course of my life. Who taught me to go where the fear is. Who, when I cried in workshop trying to read a difficult poem, as I cried trying to read and revise “Personal Effects,” held my hand and told me, Keep going. Because of him, I go.

• Stanford University - http://creativewriting.stanford.edu/people/solmaz-sharif

  LECTURER / SOLMAZ SHARIF
  GENRE / POETRY
  solmaz-sharif2

  Photo credit: Arash Saedinia

  Bio:

  Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness, and others. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, scholarships from NYU and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an NEA fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship. She has most recently been selected to receive a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award as well as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.

  Contact:

  solmazs@stanford.edu

  Office Hours Winter 2016:

  in 460-209

  Solmaz on experimentation, cold reads, and how the environment of a workshop is different from that of any other classroom.

Look
Publishers Weekly. 263.25 (June 20, 2016): p132.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
* Look

Solmaz Sharif. Graywolf (FSG, disL), $16 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-55597-744-3

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Sharif defies power, silence, and categorization in this stunning suite of poems and lyric sequences that examine the toll of war and the language of war on persons and tongues. Drawing upon the lexicon of the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Sharif produces a document of her Iranian family history, her personal life, and a shared cultural history intertwined with war and surveillance: "Daily I sit/ with the language/ they've made// of our language// to NEUTRALIZE/ the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS/ like you." Elegies for her Amoo (uncle), who was killed in the Iran-Iraq War, share space with lists of war atrocities and the banalities of military life, lyric poems about her immigrant family's experiences of surveillance, excoriations of Israeli apartheid and war crimes, and redacted letters to a detainee. Sharif returns repeatedly to the DOD dictionary terms, resulting in brief, fragmented, and powerful accounts of terror: "they LOOK down from their jets and declare my mother's Abadan block PROBABLY DESTROYED, we walked by the villas, the faces of buildings torn off into dioramas, and recorded it on a hand-held camcorder." In form, content, and execution, Sharif's debut is arguably the most noteworthy book of poetry yet about recent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the greater Middle East. (July)

• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2016/06/look-by-solmaz-sharif/
  Word count: 1690

  LOOK BY SOLMAZ SHARIF
  REVIEWED BY BRANDON AMICO
  June 15th, 2016

  “Until now, now that I’ve reached my thirties: / All my Muse’s poetry has been harmless: / American and diplomatic.” It’s hard not to hear underpinning this passage, which opens the poem “Desired Appreciation,” the suggestion that for something to be accepted as American it must go along with the current, must uphold the status quo—the exact opposite of how art functions, which is by disruption. And lest there be any misunderstanding, I’ll clarify—Solmaz Sharif’s 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 first words of Look make the author’s intents known in no uncertain terms: “It matters what you call a thing.” Unflinching is a term overused when describing writers, particularly poets, but if there’s a book deserving of this phrase, it’s Look; Solmaz Sharif is insistent that the reader understand that there is something awry, something lurking below the surface level of today’s media and discourse, and she’s going after it without hesitation.

  The poems in Look are interested in challenging the way we hear about and consider war by dismantling the language used when describing or reporting on it. Formally, the poems are concerned with euphemistic language; thematically, they target large-scale complacency with war. When these two tie together is where the book derives its tension and strength:

  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”)

  Look emphatically spotlights the sterile, modular language that is omnipresent in 21st-century America’s conversations around war and violence. It argues that such language serves to dehumanize victims in order to make such atrocities appear more palatable, breaking down such persons into disparate, interchangeable statistics or part of a monolithic “other,” until the receiver of this language is comfortable thinking of humans in terms of numbers and costs, losing sight of the individuality and humanity behind every figure. Soon following the passage quoted above, Sharif defines a term derivative of such language by its callous, real-world effects:

  In EXECUTION PLANNING, they weighed
  the losses, the SUSTAINABILITY
  and budgeted

  for X number,
  they budgeted for the phone call
  to your mother and weighed that
  against the amount saved in rations

  The words in small caps are taken from the United States Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms—these terms are present throughout much of the book, with at least one appearing in probably two-thirds of the collection’s individual poems, and are always conspicuous in their particular formatting. The ubiquity of these euphemisms in the book echo their pervasiveness in our language, even worming their way into the poems’ speaker occasionally:

  I’ve started to say such
  senseless things: “I know
  where he is coming from”
  and “I’m just doing my job.”

  (from “Free Mail”)

  In these poems, euphemism is used as a formal device to invite multiple readings or perspectives of a word or phrase, but on a larger scale (something especially apparent after stretches of Look decked with lots of small caps) they serve to consciously flag word choice used as a means to soften, sterilize, and create distance between how we describe something and the truth of that thing itself. It’s this distance created that allows room for the powerful to control the stories of everyone they want (“distance / is a funny drug and used to make me a distressed person” – from “Deception Story”). It’s what supports narratives that aim to justify what would, in the light of day, be seen as more clearly abhorrent and objectionable.

  At multiple points in the book the speaker is questioned about their ability to speak about the war (“How can she write that? / She doesn’t know” in response to lines about her uncle’s death as a soldier in the Iran-Iraq war); Sharif counters that war touches us all, though certainly some more than others, and one needn’t see the explosions with their own eyes to have their world impacted, to be able to speak about it.

  According to most
  definitions, I have never
  been at war.

  According to mine,
  most of my life
  spent there.

  (from “Personal Effects”)

  Indeed, the same conflict that took the life of that uncle—her Amoo—is the same her parents fled the country from shortly before her birth, and thus war has irrevocably changed her life before she even entered the world; underlying the collection is the assertion that, in a world shaped by centuries upon centuries of war, could that not be true of any of us? Look suggests that the catalyst of war has altered lives both in seismic and subtle ways, but it also points to a particularly poignant effect of war felt here in today’s United States: Islamophobia, which hit a disturbing fever pitch in the months before the book’s publication, during which presidential candidates called for banning the entry of Muslims into the US or creating a “patrol” of Muslim neighborhoods.

  This xenophobia is depicted in Look through its direct effects on the speaker’s life and experiences (“I say Hello NSA when I place a call,” the speaker says in “Drone”), but the readers also see the conflict internalized as a result of having one’s identity prescribed, not just once, but twice, and in opposing directions: the Islamophobes in the US telling her she doesn’t belong here, and the voices claiming she has no claim to speak of things that transpired in her family’s home overseas. This mental push and pull finds expression not only in the content but the very form of the collection’s poems.

  Formally, the poems in Look defy expectation, and in some cases easy categorization—indeed, it appears that a static and predictable form might be seen as a form of creative oppression (“What is fascism? / a student asked me … The sonnet, / I said” – from “Force Visibility”). The poems reflect and channel the energy of a speaker that is agitated, uncomfortable with the way the world is shaped around her, and is actively attempting to enact change. They shift between thin, enjambed columns and prose; they take the shape of definitions or short encyclopedia articles; some have lines that stretch or alternate between the page’s left and right margins, that braid narratives; others make ample use of white space, lists, indentations, even erasure. The latter is inferred in “Reaching Guantánamo,” which takes the form of a number of letters sent by a loved one to a detainee in the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, which are heavily redacted. The content of the letters are hollowed out, and the reader can only see the edges from which something was taken:

  Dear Salim,

  said I need to

  my tongue. It’s getting sharp.

  I told him to _________his own

  business, to _____his own

  wife. He didn’t .

  If he wasn’t my

  I would never

  again. Sometimes, I write you

  letters I don’t send. I don’t mean

  to cause alarm. I just want the ones

  you open to

  like a hill of poppies.

  Yours,

  In these letters the sender too feels to be emptying; the removal of language, the control over it as it passes between sender and receiver is a kind of violence—the collection regularly asserts this in a number of ways, but here the effect is that the force exerted on the language erases both a person and a relationship.

  Solmaz SharifLook urges us not to divert our gaze from the atrocities simultaneous with our lives, not to be distracted or misled or lulled by the language war is wrapped in, but to take that step toward actually noticing and understanding what is happening, which requires—as the book’s title plainly asserts—that we look. Look, as opposed to passively seeing what is presented: actively, consciously trying to locate the truth, ugly as it is important, and not accepting the given narratives and euphemisms at face value.

  The poems in Look do not shy away from depicting war and its emotional, physical, and psychic toll on humanity, even as it demonstrates how language is manipulated to blunt an impact or inure us to what should feel horrifying in society today. The collection’s title itself is taken from another of those euphemisms—defined as the “period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence”—but it is also a directive against the currents promoting the normalcy of war. Somewhere between a plea and a command, these poems urge us not to simply see, but to look, because this is not something happening in a world unrelated to ours: “America, ignore the window and look at your lap: / even your dinner napkins are on fire.” (“Mess Hall”) If we ignore the violence of our times because it’s easy to look away, or to believe it unavoidable, it’s on us, too:

  He was moved like that
  across a minefield—
  moved by a hand we cannot see,

  

a hand that is all our hands combined.

  (from “Personal Effects”)

• Kenyan Review
  http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/kr-reviews/selections/look-by-solmaz-sharif-738439-2/
  Word count: 1240

  “LET ME LOOK AT YOU”: ON LOOK BY SOLMAZ SHARIF

  Lisa Higgs

  Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2016. 100 pages. $16.00.
  (Click on cover image to purchase)

  Solmaz Sharif’s debut collection of poetry, Look, seems like anything but a first book. Surely a collection bookended by the powerhouse poems “Look” and “Drone” must be by a poet at the height of her career, whose clear voice and precise poetic direction draws readers into an elegy of family and a lost country, compounded by an equally powerful lament on the neutering of language for political expediency. Sharif’s melding of her own losses with those of others impacted by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and our current War on Terror grows into a catalog of voices that demand attention.

  “It matters what you call a thing,” opens the titular poem “Look.” Sharif might equally say that it matters whose voices are able to name. Framed as argument, “Look” considers a disparate group: a judge, drone operators, a lover who names the speaker “Exquisite,” and “the man outside the 2004 Republican National Convention.” Most of the poem’s stanzas begin with “Whereas,” as Sharif attempts to prove how humanity is inclined to obscure meaning:

  Whereas I feel the need to clarify: You would put up with
  TORTURE, you mean and he proclaimed: Yes,
  …

  Whereas it could take as long as 16 seconds between
  the trigger pulled in Las Vegas and the Hellfire missile
  landing in Mazar-e-Sharif, after which they will ask
  Did we hit a child? No. A dog. they will answer themselves . . .

  The answer to this initial argument plays out through the remainder of the collection in manifold forms and multitudes of voice; however, for “Look,” the answer comes in terms of sight:

  Whereas A dog, they will say: Now, therefore,

  Let it matter what we call a thing.

  Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds.

  Sharif’s use of first-person in her collection invites readers into points of view that have largely been ignored, with the “I’s” as likely to be an intelligence officer or a battlefield soldier as the poet herself. At first, the effect is disorienting—who is talking, and to whom? Is it the poet as herself or the poet as persona? Am I the intended “I” in these poems? Hidden within the erasure poem “Reaching Guantánamo”—a redacted series of letters from a wife to her Yemeni husband—a hint comes in the form of a partially erased reference to Nazim Hikmet’s epic Human Landscapes from My Country, which details the lives of Turkish people from all walks of life. Similarly, Sharif uses her “I” as a means of bringing disparate experiences of America together.

  No poem encapsulates this multiplicity of voice better than her CODA poem “Drone,” with fathers taken and grandmothers fingerprinted. While Sharif’s family members have been encountered in more intimate portraits in earlier poems, their appearance in this fractured final sequence gives them a universality that is decidedly new. This father, this grandmother could well be your own. Likewise, the “I” is itself and the reader:

  : I wrote their epitaphs in chalk

  : from my son’s wedding mattress I know this
  mound’s his room

  : I dropped a knee and engaged the enemy

  : I emptied my clip then finished the job

  Violence abounds; women are raped. The dead are everywhere on the streets and in the homes of what is assumed, at first glance, to be a far-off country. In everyday America, limitation and a failure of imagination: “: an American interrupts an A and B / conversation to tell me you don’t have to do / anything you don’t want to do.” Sharif says hello to the NSA each time she makes a call. Even so, moments of laughter and song near brutal in their tenderness:

  : my mother tape records my laugh to mail
  bubblewrapped back home

  : my mother records me singing Ye shabe
  mahtab mah miad to khab

  : I am singing the moon will come one night
  and take me away side street by side street

  Sharif’s collection is full of large moments and major poems (read David Baker’s insights on the collection’s centerpiece “Personal Effects” for Kenyon Review), but some of the smallest continue to resonate with me. Who can forget the young child of “Expellee,” who sits through doctor’s check-ups and INS waiting lines and sees:

  . . . Numbered windows,
  numbered tongues hanging out of red dispensers

  you pull at the butcher shop. The ground meat left out
  for strays, the sewing needles planted in it.

  Or the haiku-like pair of poems opening Sharif’s second section:

  BATTLEFIELD ILLUMINATION on fire
  a body running

  PINPOINT TARGET one lit desk lamp
  and a nightgown walking past the window

  In the above poems, Sharif suggests that humanity sometimes selects people to be not human. The stray child, the stray dog. The body on fire, nameless. The woman, not a woman but a nightgown. A nightgown to be targeted, and readers sense immediately that Sharif knows the many vulnerabilities of a woman dressed for bed peered at through a window.

  Much has already been made of Sharif’s use of terms from the United States Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, which appear in small caps in a majority of Look’s poems. Through careful juxtaposition, Sharif makes private moments of everyday life precarious—a “thermal shadow” marks sexual intimacy deadly in “Look” and a “permanent echo” rebounds less divinely than ominously through the acoustically designed domes of Masjid-e Imam in “Break-Up.” In her most powerful political poems, among them “Safe House,” “Deception Story,” and the elegiac “Personal Effects,” the technique tears through the expected discourse put forth by the America government and media, forcing readers to confront the personal realities that grow out of seemingly distant policy decisions. Several of the poems do not seem to benefit as much from the technique: “Ground Visibility” includes a “guard” that seems no less threatening in the form, and “Mess Hall” ends in “fire” more powerfully through its use of direct address, “America,” than font change.

  Regardless, Sharif has created an essential book of poetry for this time and this place. As she wrote in a 2013 essay about erasure: “The political . . . is not, as its strictest definition supposes, something relegated to legislative halls, but something enacted wherever power is at hand, power being at hand wherever there is a relation, including the relation between text and reader.” Future generations can quibble over Sharif’s use of small caps as a way to link the poems of this intense collection. Today’s reader-citizens must be challenged to consider the relationship between language and power, action and power, distancing and power. Solmaz Sharif and other politically inclined poets have much work ahead of them, and what an uneasy pleasure it will be to encounter future books with future provocative poems by this debut author as she documents America’s best and worst moments.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/books/review/look-poems-solmaz-sharif.html
  Word count: 742

  A Poet Subverts the Defense
  Department’s Official
  Dictionary
  By NATALIE DIAZ AUG. 19, 2016
  LOOK
  Poems
  By Solmaz Sharif
  98 pp. Graywolf Press. Paper, $16.
  The poet andactivist June Jordan once wrote that “poetry means taking control
  of the language of your life.” Solmaz Sharif does just that in her excellent debut
  collection, “Look,” pushing readers to acknowledge a lexicon of war she has drawn
  from the Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.
  Language, in this collection, is called upon as victim, executioner and witness.
  According to the military dictionary, a “look” is “a period during which a mine
  circuit is receptive of an influence” — the word “influence” in this case a way to avoid
  the word “person.” Across Sharif’s pages, other terms like “battlefield illumination,”
  “dolly,” “hung weapon,” “penetration aids” and “act of mercy” are skillfully
  repurposed in narratives and lists, with the dual capacity for violence and
  tenderness. This is not simply a war language; this is an American language. In
  Sharif’s rendering, “Look” is at once a command to see and to grieve the people these
  words describe — and also a means of implicating the reader in the violence
  delivered upon those people.
  2/12/2017 A Poet Subverts the Defense Department’s Official Dictionary ­ The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/books/review/look­poems­solmaz­sharif.html 2/3
  The bodies this military lexicon surveils are the same bodies it attempts to make
  invisible. In “Look,” we recognize each body as human: a father, an uncle, a lover, a
  daughter, a niece, a wife, as well as the body of language itself. Sharif’s bodies, even
  in their survival, succumb to the war. In a tender moment of pleasure an ocean away
  from the battlefield, “Look” shows us the speaker’s body is still susceptible to its
  devastation, still touched by it: “Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if
  heat / sensors were trained on me, they could read / my thermal shadow through the
  roof and through / the wardrobe.”
  At the book’s heart is “Personal Effects,” a stunning 31­page elegy for Sharif’s
  uncle Amoo, killed in the Iran­Iraq war. This feat of form contains prose, captions,
  sonnet, tercets, Wikipedia entries, bullet points, white space and erasure:
  In a tarot card reading
  A asks “Are you open
  to love? Are you keeping love in mind?”
  Amoo, I think.
  Amoo.
  The word a moan
  a blown kiss
  the soft things it makes a mouth do.
  In the powerful poem “Mess Hall,” Sharif writes: “America, / you have found the
  dimensions / small enough to break / a man — / a wet rag, / a bullet.” This poem is
  one of many in which line breaks work as camera shutters, producing fragmented
  lyricisms and imagery with the accumulating impact of family pictures or news
  photographs of the war and recalling Roland Barthes’s adage “I am interested in
  language because it wounds or seduces me.” More from “Personal Effects”:
  he surprises, he arrives,
  eyes taped shut, torso held together
  by black thread, fridge­cold —
  2/12/2017 A Poet Subverts the Defense Department’s Official Dictionary ­ The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/books/review/look­poems­solmaz­sharif.html 3/3
  grief is a closed area
  cluttered with his fork against the plate
  and other forgotten musics.
  The language of “Look” is a body that cannot be separated from its maker — it is
  always the best and worst of its speakers’ desires, needs and actions. Language can
  never be innocent. An artful lexicographer, Sharif shows us that the diameter of a
  word is often as devastating as the diameter of a bomb. When she writes, “Let me
  look at you,” the mine detonates and a single line rings through the entire collection
  into the larger world of poetry and life: “It matters what you call a thing.”
  Natalie Diaz is the author of a book of poems, “When My Brother Was an Aztec.”
  A version of this review appears in print on August 21, 2016, on Page BR21 of the Sunday Book Review
  with the headline: Lexicon of War.

• Harvard Review
  http://harvardreview.fas.harvard.edu/?q=features/book-review/look
  Word count: 989

  LOOK
  by Solmaz Sharif
  reviewed by Julie Swarstad Johnson
  July 5, 2016
  “According to most / definitions, I have never / been at war,” writes Solmaz Sharif in Look, her highly anticipated debut poetry collection. A crucial statement follows: “According to mine, / most of my life / spent there” (“Personal Effects”). Sharif, a poet of Iranian descent and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, delivers a complicated, commanding account of contemporary American life for those who live under constant suspicion because of their origins. The poems in Look shift between clear-eyed description and exhausted wariness, painful in their honest assessment of the destruction caused by our present conflicts and ways of being.

  He was moved like that
  across a minefield—
  moved by a hand we cannot see,

  a hand that is all our hands combined. (“Personal Effects”)
  In Look, Sharif makes powerful use of personal narrative and reclaimed military language to illustrate the ways the hand of war “is all our hands combined.” No one is unconnected to war in this urgent, impassioned collection.

  “It matters what you call a thing,” begins Look’s title poem. The statement appears after a jarring epigraph: a definition of the word “look” from the US Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. In a military context, the epigraph tells us, “look” means “a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence”—lethal force described with bland, circuitous language. Terms from the Dictionary appear throughout Look, printed in small capital letters and used as titles, lists, keywords, or starting points for poems. Taken out of a military context, these terms' overtly sexual, coercive nature frequently becomes apparent: “Please come with a safe password and a nickname, we’ll provide penetration aids and restraints” (“Special Events for Homeland Security”). More often, however, Sharif underscores the way these terms negate the value of human life:

  Daily I sit
  with the language
  they’ve made

  of our language

  to neutralize
  the capability of low dollar value items
  like you. (“Personal Effects”)
  Terms from the Dictionary disrupt seemingly private moments: “Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if heat sensors were trained on me, they could read my thermal shadow through the roof and through the wardrobe” (“Look”). The personal and the political are inextricable, Sharif reminds us.

  Throughout Look, Sharif incorporates fragments of conversation, calling to mind Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. In Citizen, instances of subtle and outright racism elicit disbelief from the book’s speaker: “What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard?” For Sharif’s speaker, the surprise comes at what she hears herself saying:

  I feel like I must muzzle myself,
  I told my psychiatrist.

  "So you feel dangerous?” she said.
  Yes.
  "So you feel like a threat?”
  Yes.
  Why was I so surprised to hear it? ("Desired Appreciation")
  Sharif demonstrates that a life lived under scrutiny and suspicion (“my father says say whatever you want over the phone”) erodes one’s ability to trust oneself (“my mother has a hard time believing anything’s bugged,” “Drone”). The world must always be faced with defenses up, a posture that leads to an internalized sense of self as threat.

  Importantly, Look’s project is one of reclaiming. “Personal Effects,” a long poem focused on Sharif’s uncle—who was one of an estimated one million soldiers and civilians killed in the Iran-Iraq war—most fully realizes this act. In the poem, Sharif is “attempting [her] own // myth-making,” trying to reconstruct her uncle from photographs, letters, and fragmented family memories. The poem recounts its own making, including the incredulity of early readers who discounted Sharif’s ability to imagine her own uncle’s life: “‘How can she write that? / She doesn’t know,’ a friend, a daughter / of a Vietnam vet, told another friend.” Against this, Sharif argues passionately and persuasively for the powerful connection between imagination and empathy:

  And I place in his hands his head
  And I place in his hands my hands
  And I place in his eyes a look we share in the rearview
  And I place between us a bar of laughter
  And I place between us the looking and the telling they want
  dead (“Personal Effects”)
  Although described in negative terms (“the telling they want / dead”), the effect of this imagined exchange between speaker and uncle is one of healing, one of connection and overcoming despite the barriers of silence and fear others would place between them.

  Overcoming the barriers that fear erects between us—in the aftermath of horrific violence in Orlando, in a moment when political credence is given to racism and xenophobia—Look has been published just when it is most needed. Grief and wariness permeate the book and make these difficult poems to read, but the work they do is utterly necessary. Like Muriel Rukeyser’s lastingly important “The Book of the Dead,” Look immerses us in the disastrous impacts of widespread injustice. Rukeyser’s virtuosic documentary poem shed light on an industrial disaster that caused the deaths of hundreds of miners, the result of corporate and governmental negligence; with similar turns of reportage and lyricism, Sharif’s Look exposes the pervasive trauma of war and of being labeled a potential threat by your country and by those with whom you interact daily. “[I]t was his bare toes / that made me cry / because I realized then he had toes,” Sharif writes of a photograph of her uncle (“Personal Effects”). To see another person’s humanness: Look calls us back to this most simple, this most essential task.

• Los Angeles Review
  http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-look-by-solmaz-sharif/
  Word count: 441

  BOOK REVIEW: LOOK BY SOLMAZ SHARIF
  9781555977443
  Look
  Poems by Solmaz Sharif
  Graywolf Press, July 2016
  ISBN-13: 978-1-555977443
  $16.00; 112pp.
  Reviewed by Phillip West

  Solmaz Sharif’s debut collection, Look, is a brilliant dive into how war affects people and language.

  As a first-generation daughter of Iranian parents, war wasn’t first-hand for Sharif; “How could she say the things she does not know.” the speaker ponders in the formidable fragment series “Personal Effects.” But war nonetheless persists in the speaker’s history and present. “I burn my finger on the broiler and smell trenches” rings a refrain in the collection’s closing poem, “Coda.”

  In this way, Sharif’s second-hand war is a first-hand war of her own. (Again, from “Personal Effects”):

  According to most
  definitions, I have never
  been at war.

  According to mine,
  most of my life
  spent there.

  The pervading motif throughout Look is Sharif’s use of terms plucked from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. This book of morally sanitized nomenclature—consisting of terms like THERMAL SHADOW, NEUTRALIZED, PERSON ELIGIBLE TO RECEIVE EFFECTS—is cunningly turned against itself, as Sharif calls attention to phrases that beg anonymity and are shrouded in euphemism. In “Battlefield Illumination,” Sharif re-fangs the term DESTRUCTION RADIUS:

  limited to blast site
  and not the brother abroad
  who answers his phone
  then falls against the counter
  or punches a cabinet door

  Form plays a critical role in Look through sequences, fragments, shards, and lists that induce the reader to search through post-war rubble. In “Personal Effects,” Sharif writes a fragment about a photo of a soldier holding a bazooka (his smile “ruining the picture”). Next, in “Reaching Guantanamo,” she writes a series of letters to a Guantanamo prisoner, letters that have been edited, presumably, by a prison official. One note begins:

  Dear Salim,

  Lightning across the sky all night, lighting up my .
  but no rain. No .
  when I get home, everything is
  ………………………………dust.

  This redacted, bombed-out, war-torn form slightly disorients the reader, who can still piece together the larger picture, the larger struggle.

  In the vein of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Look is, at its core, a political call to attention: If we are to combat the effects of war on people and language, we must first understand how war permeates our society and culture. To this end, Look is not only relevant, but eye opening.

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-solmaz-sharif-20160627-snap-story.html
  Word count: 1342

  Solmaz Sharif and the poetics of a new American generation
  Solmaz Sharif
  Poet Solmaz Sharif (Arash Saedinia)
  John Freeman
  Step gently on words such as “home” or “citizen” or even “body” with a foot born elsewhere and they combust. Place names are even more incendiary. What happens when we read BEIRUT or TEHRAN or SAIGON while sitting at a cafe in Santa Monica?

  This is war’s lexicon. It incorporates and redefines, especially by naming. In the U.S., recent Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Nguyen reminds us, we know the conflict as the Vietnam War; in Saigon, they call it the American War.

  If writers must return history to human scale, the last decade of American life has proved just how necessary their linguistic re-engineering will be, even within our borders. In “Citizen,” Claudia Rankine showed it was possible to rescue the suffering of black bodies from spectacle if we questioned how we watched and from where.

  Meanwhile, a new generation of poets — all descendants of the American Empire — have undertaken a project similar to Rankine’s on two fronts: retelling the myth of their being, and reclaiming language which has attempted to claim them.

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  “Daily I sit/with the language/they’ve made/of our language /to NEUTRALIZE/the CAPABILITY OF LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS/like you.”
  — Solmaz Sharif
  Two extraordinary debut collections in 2016 have lighted the way for this revolution. Ocean Vuong’s “Night Sky With Exit Wounds” spins tales of the poet’s life — born on a rice farm, the grandchild of an American soldier and a Vietnamese farm girl. He tosses the myths into orbit with the light-fingered panache of a reincarnated Frank O’Hara. You have to wonder, reading it, if Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” has finally found its ecstatic textbook.

  Meanwhile, this month, Solmaz Sharif — a poet of Iranian decent born in Turkey and educated in America who now teaches at Stanford — publishes her debut, “Look,” a startling sequence of poems built from phrases out of the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, beginning with the word in its title.

  “Look,” that lexicon tells us, in mine warfare, is “a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of influence.”

  The period “Look” claims as its own influence begins with the Iran-Iraq War, a conflict stoked by the U.S., claiming over 1 million lives, including the poet’s uncle. Sharif elegizes him beautifully in the book’s final sequence. He is her muse and a form of beloved. She addresses him directly, knowing that if her words cannot bring him back, they might undo the collateral damage done to language by war. “Daily I sit/with the language/they’ve made/of our language,” she writes. “to NEUTRALIZE/the CAPABILITY OF LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS/like you.” And: “This album is a STOP-LOSS.”

  “Look” builds up to this realization. Like all lyrics, it begins with the body. This might be one of the sexiest books ever made from the long fallout of war. “It matters what you call a thing,” Sharif writes in the title poem, “Exquisite a lover called me./Exquisite.” The poem tumbles forward from here, using the associative illogic of a John Ashbery verse, only here the vernacular tonal shifts and echolocated stress points are called attention to by the word “Whereas.”

  Solmaz Sharif's 'Look' [is] a startling sequence of poems built from phrases out of the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms
  — John Freeman on 'Look'
  Unlike Ashbery, Sharif needs her reader to pay attention to how language’s associations map themselves back onto her body. So she writes:

  Whereas it could take as long as 16 seconds between

  the trigger pulled in Las Vegas and the Hellfire missile

  landing in Mazar-e-Sharif, after which they will ask

  Did we hit a child? No. A dog. they will answer themselves;

  and:

  Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if heat

  censors were trained on me, they could read

  my THERMAL SHADOW through the roof and through

  the wardrobe;

  As it telescopes in and out, “Look” performs through disassembly what Rankine’s “Citizen” achieved through juxtaposition: a repositioning of viewer and viewed. To maintain this effect, Sharif needs to keep jarring her reader’s word associations loose, and so her collection busily differentiates. There are itemized lists, descriptions of photographs, snatches of letters, imagined letters — censored, torn out phrases from news reports, and even, in one instance, a list of U.S. operation names in Iraq, stretching from WOLFHOUND FURY to the sinisterly ironic GLAD TIDINGS OF BENEVOLENCE.

  Such a wide variety of shapes and syntaxes should feel disruptive. In some sense, they do, they’re meant to, but the cumulative effect of “Look” has a pleasing coherence in the mind’s eye. By simply placing words from the Defense dictionary in small caps, and deploying them in scenes of intimacy — adjacent to poems about the sexualization of military violence — Sharif has begun the process of renaturing them, putting them in the readers’ hands for examination. “America,” Sharif writes in a rare moment of oracular address, “ignore the window and look at your lap:/even your dinner napkins are on FIRE.”

  'Look: Poems'
  'Look: Poems' (Graywolf Press)
  As Sharif asks the reader to adjust their lens, she dramatizes the dilation of her own. She looks at home movies of her father, imagining what he must have felt, separated from his family for long stretches of time. Sharif looks at the history of California, where she lives, as a colonial text.

  Most effectively, she interrogates her own long poetic gestation. “Until now, that I’ve reached my thirties:/All my Muse’s poetry has been harmless,” she writes in “Desired Appreciation,” a poem about citizenship and the yearning to please, to belong. “I feel like I must muzzle myself,” she recalls telling a psychiatrist, and suddenly the book in our hands vibrates all the more. If it his not clear then, it is now: This book is the unmuzzling.

  Eventually Sharif’s montaging of Defense Department terms into her work has achieved its purpose (luckily, just one or two of the poems sound like anti-imperial Mad Libs). The end result is she has rebuilt the building of her language, and as she elegizes her uncle, phrases like CLOSED AREA and CELESTIAL GUIDANCE proceed from her contextual meaning rather than the other way around.

  Working from a series of photographs her uncle carried at the front, and letters he wrote home, she imagines him, pays tribute to him, puts him back in his body. “What I see are your hands/peeling apples,” she writes in one of the sequence’s loving passages, “the skin curling/to the floor in one long unravel.”

  Lyricism is so often over-used in poetry, but here Sharif deploys it perfectly; she heightens language to remember what was. In this fashion, “Look” creates an after-image similar to that of Robin Coste Lewis’ National Book Award-winning 2015 debut, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” with its meditation on the long aftermath of slavery and diaspora. Like that book, “Look” feels like a disassembled museum exhibit with the occluded stories — the ones not told — written into view. Look, it compels you to do, and you will.

  John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual, the latest issue of which — themed to family — publishes next month.