RaveThe New YorkerIn these poems, the ostensible clarity of borders and checkpoints gives way to a terrain of fundamental uncertainty, a geography of elusive thresholds, delayed arrivals, and impossible returns ... Rejecting the injunction to bear witness, she displays a thrilling contempt for literature’s vaunted ability to elicit empathy...For Sharif, the chalk lines around a body, like the borderlines around a body politic, are another boundary not to be trusted; the contours of personal experience can’t describe, literally or literarily, the truth of a trauma ... Sharif’s collection imagines how a poet’s well-chosen lines might reject the arbitrary lines set by someone else’s customs—that is, both its borders and its norms.
