She is, in turns, icy and searing, but consistently fierce and beautiful.” -NPR.org It is the central miracle of Look that Sharif shows us the real intensity of her conceit without veering into triteness. “ poetry flicks between lyric and lexicon while still sounding like music in her hands, language is as pliant as warmed wax.

“A restless, gorgeous book of poetry.” -Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker Page-Turner By turns fierce and tender, the poems are a searing response to American intervention.” - The New Yorker “Sharif’s skillful debut collection draws on a Defense Department lexicon of military terms.” - The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice An artful lexicographer, Sharif shows us that the diameter of a word is often as devastating as the diameter of a bomb.” - New York Times Book Review 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 these people. 'Let it matter what we call a thing,' she writes. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. 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. 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.Īt the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. 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. 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. *Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award* *Finalist for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award*

Shards of war vox