Look by Solmaz Sharif

If I say drone, do you think of the verb or do you think of the technology? In Look’s Notes, we are told that the military term was removed from the United States Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms in 2015, because it had been assimilated into the English language. While that could be lauded as creative linguistic expansion, you’d have to be naïve not to recognize the authority of this freak Orwellian newspeak, devoid of emotion, priding itself on the technical, the non-human. It’s easier to kill people if they’re within the casualty limit boundary, if death is, quite literally, neutralized (‘Personal Effects’).

The military empire is colonial in nature: its reach extends to linguistics. Its discourse seeks to marginalize and encase the Other: in ‘Break-Up’, Sharif makes this encasement visually literal, as the speaker’s personal diction is contained within brackets, and where military language is the non-bracketed dominant: [I loved you at lunch] / the result of magnification. This is not a collection about subjugation, however: it’s one of resistance. Sharif fights back by deconstructing the Defense’s Military dictionary, claiming its signifieds and placing them into the realm of affect, subverting the military’s verbal power play by connecting it to marginalised, Othered lives: Let me look at you (‘Look’), He said use wood sticks to hold up your protest signs then use them in / self-defense when the horses come (‘Safe House’).

One of the most remarkable things about Look is the way Sharif effaces the gulf between the domestic (home) and the alien (the terrain of war, foreign countries). In this sense, she disrupts the idea of comfort that comes with being far away from action, or the remove that comes with letters, images (it’s no surprise that photography is a central theme, most memorably in the ‘Personal Effects’ sequence). Not even the sexual—that realm of privacy which we cling so tightly to—will escape melding with the public. Take ‘Deception Story’, where an agent will […] pat the hair at your hot black dome. War and home collide in the poet’s diction, so that, combined with Sharif’s free verse and judicious use of space, words come at you like threats, charged with innuendo: fridges full / after the explosion (‘Lay’), The doctor’s softly / splintered popsicle stick (‘Expellee’), pistols in their lunch pails (‘Dependers/Immediate Family’). Metre often enhances this sense of danger: take the anapaestic beat in ‘Lay’, for instance, which gently magnifies the last word into a thud—beneath an arm […] in a shroud.

The domestic—a home—doesn’t only mean a place sheltered from world violence. It is also a living room in Iran, pock-marked with gunshots. It is an Irani family living in America, dealing with the war from a physical remove, fighting another kind of torment at home, grieving. Urgent doesn’t do this collection justice. It should be mandatory reading.

Graywolf Press