> > Look: Poems by Solmaz Sharif
Look: Poems by Solmaz Sharif

Look: Poems by Solmaz Sharif

$ 16.00

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."

Year: 2016

Paperback

Related Products

Sale
The Clever Sheikh of the Butana and Other Stories: Sudanese Folk Tales by Ali Lutfi Abdallah

The Clever Sheikh of the Butana and Other Stories: Sudanese Folk Tales by Ali Lutfi Abdallah

Interlink Books $ 14.00 Sold out
Sale
Tower of Dreams: A Novel by Kathryn Abdul-Baki

Tower of Dreams: A Novel by Kathryn Abdul-Baki

Three Continents Press $ 6.00 Sold out
My Voice Sought the Wind by Susan Abulhawa

My Voice Sought the Wind by Susan Abulhawa

Just World Books $ 17.99
Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry by Adonis, Mahmud Darwish, and Samih al-Qasim

Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry by Adonis, Mahmud Darwish, and Samih al-Qasim

Saqi Books $ 18.95