Look: Poems (Signed First Edition)

Sharif, Solmaz

ISBN 10: 1555977448 / ISBN 13: 9781555977443

Published by Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, 2016

About this Item

First edition. 7th printing. Fine. Trade paperback original. A tight clean copy. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page to prior owner. Finalist for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award. Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. Solmaz Sharif's first book.

Seller Inventory # Poetry-Trade-paperback-office

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Look: Poems (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Graywolf Press, Minneapolis
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555977448
• ISBN 13: 9781555977443
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

*Finalist for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award*
*Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award*

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. 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 discrimination endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.

At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. 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. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. "Let it matter what we call a thing," she writes. "Let me look at you."

Daily I sit
with the language
they've made

of our language

to NEUTRALIZE
the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMs
like you.

You are what is referred to as
a "CASUALTY."

--from "Personal Effects"

About the Author

Solmaz Sharif has published poetry in The New Republic and Poetry, and has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.