Customs: Poems by Solmaz Sharif

In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America.

With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through.

While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself—its foreclosures, affects, successes—she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom.

Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.

This will be the last I write of it directly, I say each time.
This is a light that lights everything and dimly.
All my waiting at this railing.
All my writing is this squint. 

Solmaz Sharif is the author of a Customs and Look, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in Granta, the New Republic, and Poetry. She is currently the Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor of English at U.C. Berkeley. ( https://solmazsharif.com/ )

Customs: Poems
by Solmaz Sharif
86 pages
Paperback
Publisher: Graywolf Press
March 1, 2022
Language: ‎English
Paperback: ‎72 pages
ISBN-10:1644450798
ISBN-13:978-1644450796
$15.99

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