RaveThe Sewanee ReviewFor me—and, I suspect, for the multitude of readers who anticipated Customs with a giddy devotion otherwise reserved for album drops and movie trailers—there’s no talking about her work without mentioning its intense feeling, no less vehement for being stalled inside a stalemate of ambivalences and internalized cross-purposes ... How does Sharif transform the wishy-washiness of ambivalence into hard, crystalline art? Customs proves—and here, too, she is representative of her generation and its thankfully broadening canon—how much she has learned from the mixed feelings and conflicted testaments of modern Black poets.
