Customs: Poems

by Solmaz Sharif

Overview

Finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Finalist for the 2022 L.A. Times Book Prize for Poetry
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450796
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	72
Sales rank:	114,933
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.40(d)

Table of Contents

America 3

I

Dear Aleph 7

Beauty 8

Self-Care 10

Social Skills Training 12

Dear Aleph 13

Visa 14

Persistence of Vision: Gwendolyn Brooks 15

Planetarium 16

Now What 17

Persistence of Vision: Televised Confession 19

He, Too 21

Dear Aleph 22

Learning Persian 24

Patronage 25

Into English 29

The End of Exile 31

II

Without Which 35

The Master's House 59

III

Does yours have a landscape? 63

An Otherwise 65

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/17/2022

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.)

Publishers Weekly

With an anthropological eye, Sharif’s reflections on freedom, consumerism and loyalty are at once witty and incisive. . . . As she masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief, Sharif manages, with conviction and consistency, to make the reader feel welcome.”—Jessica Gigot, New York Times Book Review

“Blistering in its clear-sightedness, 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.”—Library Journal, starred review

“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.”—Michael Ruzicka, Booklist, starred review

“Sharif's commanding voice reverberates throughout this complex and confident collection.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Dazzling. . . . Sharif’s language is spare and all the more sharp for what remains, for all that she has left out, as the sculptor does with a slab of marble. . . . This is poetry—this is a poet—that marvels us in manners minute and majestic.”—Mandana Chaffa, Ploughshares

“Sharif’s ruminations on language in Customs—and how to keep it alive and potent—cement her position as one of the most thoughtful poets working today.”—Christos Kalli, Harvard Review

“Spectacular. . . . In a massive feat, Customs continues the work of Look, pushing its mission forward with a new slate of sharp, memorable pieces that are set to inspire yet another generation.”—Summer Farah, Cleveland Review of Books

“Sharif masterfully blends, develops, and transforms her imagery throughout Customs in such a seamless and unexpected way that the reader effortlessly follows these gorgeous, golden, and intelligent threads all the way to the brink of epiphany and beyond.”—Veronica Schorr, New York Journal of Books

From the Publisher

★ 03/01/2022

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

Library Journal