Review by Booklist Review
Sharif's second poetry collection (after Look, 2016) elaborately constructs a forbidding yet alluring labyrinth. Each poem conveys a struggle to hold on to a culture while being, in many ways, required to give up that culture. "Self-Care" is a set of daringly specific rhetorical questions, "Have you removed / your metal fillings? Made peace / with your mother? With all / the mothers you can? Or tried". Sharif uses line breaks to succinctly make a point, then challenges the reader to gather the will to go on to the next emotion or the next obstacle to understanding from the subject's point of view. The second part in this three-part volume is a rhythmic long poem, "Without Which," that is punctuated by pairs of bracket symbols spaced, seemingly at random, between stanzas. The effect is like a patch of empty wall between images both ancient and contemporary. The last section repeats this technique to a greater and more personal degree by bringing in familial landmarks and personal laments. The hallways and arrows of a customs office offer but one interpretation for the elements in this increasingly poignant and important collection. Sharif demonstrates remarkable talent in her ability to so deftly portray the traumatizing balance required to live in the West with deep roots in Iran.
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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sharif (Look) movingly excavates in her powerful second collection an internal landscape haunted by psychic dissonance and fractured identity. As the title suggests, these works are preoccupied with the in-between. The speaker is sometimes in an airport, but often in a state of alienation relating to those around her: "We were tanners/ pushed to the edge of the/ city," she explains, "Then we worked/ the cafeterias/ at the// petroleum offices of the British. Then, revolution./ Simple." She visits Shiraz in a poem titled "The End of Exile," feeling both at home and foreign at once: "As the dead, so I come to the city I am of. Am without." Sharif captures the bleak shape that everyday objects can suddenly take on when one is in a dark mood: "The fridge is a thing with weak magnets, a little sweaty on the inside/ A bag of shriveled limes." Many poems are addressed as letters to a person called Aleph, the first letter in the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, and in one particularly striking example, the poet contemplates systems of power through the lens of Ethel Rosenberg's execution. Sharif's commanding voice reverberates throughout this complex and confident collection. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Following the National Book Award finalist Look, Sharif's second collection is alternately scathing, funny, resigned, and transcendent. Her poems interrogate the bonds of social performance and the bureaucratic language of power ("Studies suggest it's best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none"), then invert that lens on poetry itself, as in the tellingly titled "Patronage": "Poets convinced they are ringmaster/ when it is with big brooms and bins, in fact,/ they enter to clear the elephant scat." The poems grapple with belonging, what it means to exist inside and outside--of a nation, language, place, or time. Whether probing the arbitrary power of a U.S. customs agent or the language to which one defaults ("To lament the fact of your lamentations in English, English being your first defeat"), speakers confront the gulfs between self and home. The fragmented long poems of the second and third sections effectively utilize absence and space to mirror these ideas. VERDICT Blistering in its clear-sightedness ("No crueler word than return./ No greater lie"), this collection offers a fierce, beautiful closing that dares to imagine "a beckoning, a way." A bold and uncompromising book with virtuosic emotional range; highly recommended.--Amy Dickinson
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