Customs

With Customs, Solmaz Sharif offers a series of poetic refusals, weighing nuanced questions with care and attention to make the poem a site of live enquiry. In the face of hard borders these poems seek a reckoning with the structures on which these limits are built and with what counts as resistance in the West. 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 on 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.