Solmaz Sharif's Look, Made From Fallout of War, Reviewed at Jacket Copy

"If writers must return history to human scale, the last decade of American life has proved just how necessary their linguistic re-engineering will be, even within our borders," writes John Freeman at Jacket Copy, thinking on "war's lexicon." "[A] new generation of poets," he continues, "have undertaken a project similar to [Claudia] Rankine’s on two fronts: retelling the myth of their being, and reclaiming language which has attempted to claim them."

Freeman ends up looking at Solmaz Sharif's debut collection, Look (Graywolf, July 2016), "a startling sequence of poems built from phrases out of the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms":

“Look,” that lexicon tells us, in mine warfare, is “a period during which a mine circuit is receptive of influence.”

The period “Look” claims as its own influence begins with the Iran-Iraq War, a conflict stoked by the U.S., claiming over 1 million lives, including the poet’s uncle. Sharif elegizes him beautifully in the book’s final sequence. He is her muse and a form of beloved. She addresses him directly, knowing that if her words cannot bring him back, they might undo the collateral damage done to language by war. “Daily I sit/with the language/they’ve made/of our language,” she writes. “to NEUTRALIZE/the CAPABILITY OF LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS/like you.” And: “This album is a STOP-LOSS.”

“Look” builds up to this realization. Like all lyrics, it begins with the body. This might be one of the sexiest books ever made from the long fallout of war. “It matters what you call a thing,” Sharif writes in the title poem, “Exquisite a lover called me./Exquisite.” The poem tumbles forward from here, using the associative illogic of a John Ashbery verse, only here the vernacular tonal shifts and echolocated stress points are called attention to by the word “Whereas.”

Unlike Ashbery, Sharif needs her reader to pay attention to how language’s associations map themselves back onto her body...

Read the full piece at Jacket Copy.