Search Results

Look : poems

Author

Sharif, Solmaz, author.

Preferred Title

Poems. Selections

Title

Look : poems / Solmaz Sharif.

Format

Book

Published

Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, [2016] ©2016

Description

98 pages ; 23 cm

Other contributors

Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota, funder. Minnesota State Arts Board, funder. Amazon Literary Partnership, funder.

Contents

• I. Look
• II. Battlefield illumination ; Pinpoint target ; Lay ; Contaminated remains ; Safe house ; Deception story ; Special events for homeland security ; Dear intelligence journal ; Free mail ; Force visibility ; Break-up ; Ground visibility ; Desired appreciation ; Inspiration Point, Berkeley ; Dependers/immediate family ; Stateless person ; Family of scatterable mines ; Master film ; Expellee ; Mess hall ; Theater ; Soldier, home early, surprises his wife in Chick-fil-A ; Vulnerability study ; Reaching Guantánamo
• III. Perception management ; Personal effects
• Coda. Drone
• Notes
• Acknowledgments.

Summary

"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.'"--Amazon.

Awards

National Book Award Finalist.

Subject headings

War--Terminology--Poetry.

Genre heading

Poetry. Political poetry. War poetry. War poetry. War poetry. Political poetry.

ISBN

9781555977443 (paperback) 1555977448 (paperback)

Standard Identifier

99971695563