"Look" by Solmaz Sharif

Let it matter what we call a thing

The Poetry is Not a Luxury Book Club January selection is Look by Solmaz Sharif. 

Look is an astonishing first book that asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable losses 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 discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.

In Look, Sharif, who was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents who fled the country after the 1979 revolution, appropriates 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 of military language designed to disguise and discount human life and of the lives of her family, 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.


Below you'll find links to articles and review to help you more fully explore this amazing collection.


Look is:

A Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry
One of The New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2016
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016
A Washington Post Best Poetry Collection of 2016
One of The New Yorker's Books We Loved in 2016
One of the San Francisco Chronicle's 100 Recommended Books of 2016

 

Click here for a video of Sharif reading from the collection at the 2016 National Book Awards 

 

Click here to read the title poem "Look" on PEN America

 

Solmaz Sharif in an interview with the National Book Award on who she wrote this book for:  

I wrote Look for the dead. For the displaced. For myself and my own outrage and perceived powerlessness. For history, believing that somewhere in our literary record, this outrage, this grief, this Mustapha Mohammad Khalaf, 15 months old must be registered, that the history of the “Wars on Terror” should not be left to the generals and the embedded journalists. read more

 

Lisa Higgs, in the Kenyon Review Online, writing about Sharif's use of "I" in the poems:

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? read more

Brandon Amico in The Rumpus on the forms Sharif uses in the 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. read more