Review by New York Times Review
THE POET AND ACTIVIST 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. 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 31-page elegy for Sharif's uncle Amoo, killed in the Iran-Iraq war. This feat of form contains prose, captions, sonnet, tercets, Wikipedia entries, bullet points, white space and erasure: 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, fridge-cold - 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." In a tarot card reading NATALIE DIAZ is the author of a book of poems, "When My Brother Was an Aztec."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Destruction radius. Collateral. Distressed person. Language can be so drained of emotional content that we're safely distanced from the reality behind it. But in these raw, unsparing poems, Rona Jaffe Award winner Sharif closes the gap, making language itself the issue as she investigates the consequences-particularly for herself and her family-of America's invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq ("My life in the American/ Dream is a DOWNGRADE"). Chillingly, Sharif often splices in phrases taken from the U.S. Department of Defense's Dictionary of Military Terms ("Ladies, bring your KILL BOX, Boys, your HUNG WEAPON. You will push WARHEAD MATING to the THRESHOLD OF ACCEPTABILITY"), and we learn how thoroughly war and the refugee's flight permeated the consciousness. VERDICT Highly recommended. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
