... a dazzling collection ... Through her poems, Sharif rebels against gatekeepers, memorializing small and large violations of the spirit and body. She skillfully employs syntax and placement to signify the outsider experience, and how many voices and narratives have been silenced. Her poems often exhibit a wide expanse of white space to frame powerful linguistic fragments, which are complete in their vivid imagery yet leave room for personal interpretation ... Sharif uses language, often fragments with extended impact, to unveil the indescribable and to embody emotion that language can’t possibly express, but in such talented hands, somehow does ... In some sections, Sharif beautifully creates blizzards of white space with words or couplets, interspersed like small people from a distance or footsteps of those who’ve come before. The reading process forces our electronically trained mind and visual cortexes to slow down and also physically presents the hesitations of searching for words that may not be found, in languages in which one may not be fluent. Sharif’s language is spare and all the more sharp for what remains, for all that she has left out, as the sculptor does with a slab of marble ... This is poetry—this is a poet—that marvels us in manners minute and majestic. That will always be current, of its time, of our times.

Ancient though the motif may be, Sharif’s closed doors point to new possibilities for the lyric ... enthralling ... This is a poet discovering a new kind of power. Without knowing what it means—or where or when or even whether it exists—Sharif writes the scene she has in mind ... I haven’t been able to stop thinking of this page since I first read it. Are these two voices each describing the life they might otherwise have lived? Memory puts us on solitary paths. We feel those paths pull apart in the last three lines, in which the voices don’t quite address each other. But Sharif has shown that memory isn’t merely personal, and that imagination isn’t merely fantasy. To read this book is to be made aware of the waving.

Customs inspects language itself as a device for colonization and country-making, which in this land is the same ... At times, Sharif is the speaker in her poems, retelling with clarity and cunning the relationship between agents of the state and subjects of state surveillance ... these poems...illustrate the sense of belonging one must develop to themselves, to art, and to the pursuit of liberation, especially if one thinks they cannot truly belong to the country in which they live ... Sharif makes clear her political and poetical influences in these poems, which deal in freeform, syllabic, and epistolary structures ... At times, Sharif is the speaker in her poems, retelling with clarity and cunning the relationship between agents of the state and subjects of state surveillance ... Part of what a settler-colonial nation state demands of its people to maintain order, function, complicity, and compliance are certain forms of speech that are deferential to power and dismissive of one’s needs. We do this regularly and fluently in America, where police kill Black people over the course of a traffic stop. Participating in this form of language is integral to saving one’s life, but it’s a trap, Sharif seems to say, negating one’s power.

Solmaz Sharif’s spectacular sophomore collection, Customs, is filled with crushing poems that carry weariness, rebuilt and disrupted again and again ... Customs builds a collection from the tensions that exist in the word 'customs' itself: tradition, ritual, longevity; but also: a border, a declaration, a sterile proceeding. It is through these tensions that the poems of Customs arrive, some sharp and heavy-hitting, others long and drawn out with ample space on the page. Whether in the collapse of logical reason in 'Social Skills Training'—a prose poem that ends with the gutting line, 'Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?'—or the enormity of 'An Otherwise,' Customs' strength comes from its ability to be vulnerable and determined all at once ... In a massive feat, Customs continues the work of Look, pushing its mission forward with a new slate of sharp, memorable pieces that are set to inspire yet another generation.

... brings together these disparate definitions in poems that push against poetic custom ... In her poems, Sharif takes economy of style to an extreme—but she does more than just that. For her, disruption and negation are also powerful tools of communication. This is the case even in her longer poems ... In poems like this, Sharif places readers in the in-between position she occupies. She forces us to live with the uncertainty of not understanding things fully ... Sharif’s ruminations on language in Customs—and how to keep it alive and potent—cement her position as one of the most thoughtful poets working today.

... her work rejects the embrace of any we for whom sharing is an uncomplicated act ... Reading these poems, it is impossible to sustain the fiction of a relationship—including a readership—wholly bracketed from the world empire has made ... Out of sync with her surroundings, the speaker wields the perceptive powers estrangement grants ... In the face of the impossible task of contesting the violences of language from the inside, Sharif presses the boundaries of the possible, recording and disrupting the process by which the borders of the social are produced and patrolled.

I’d never once thought that Sharif might have cushioned her critiques in Look. That collection still seems razor-sharp to me. But the new book renews Sharif’s resolution to see clearly, to look—and not only at other lives, but also at her own. What she sees is an outrage that is still insufficient to the violence she catalogs ... Sharif sets the military dictionary aside and clears space for a thrilling taboo rage ... her toolkit has been pared down, resulting in a more direct, cutting voice for her anti-imperialism ... Sharif’s lineation creates a ghostly visual rhyme of the censor’s destruction. We wonder at the erasures, and feel the denial of intimacy ... Sharif's rage in these poems is incandescent. It illuminates, shows us how to see ... through her writing, Sharif demonstrates that seeing clearly is a habit that must be practiced — and guarded against ruin.

In 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.

... has cemented the author as a visionary of contemporary American poetry. Her scathing and much-needed critique of the American experience and the imposition of the English language is brilliant, austere, and, importantly, freeing ... Sharif masterfully blends, develops, and transforms her imagery throughout Customs in such a seamless and unexpected way that the reader effortlessly follows these gorgeous, golden, and intelligent threads all the way to the brink of epiphany and beyond. The forced removal of clothing, in a literal sense, is evidence of the brutality of assimilating into American culture. This act (performance) is a figurative peeling-back of one’s home, one’s cultural and racial identity, and one’s individualism and autonomy. The speaker once again seeks to escape these impositions, but recognizes them as, unfortunately, necessary for this American existence ... Solmaz Sharif’s unburdening—the reader feels freer, smarter, and more empathetic by the end. It is a collection of poems that is certain to be treasured and studied for generations.

Sharif’s keen vision in these poems, fatigued and reddened, waits for her to exit customs, and writes of her arrival ... This is the America of checkpoints that Sharif can recognise anywhere, this star-spangled fabric of its language. This poem stacks questions atop questions. They are imperative, an imperial utterance made beautiful with flourishes, perhaps even by the dappled punctuation that remains in vision just long enough to bring politeness ashore.

For 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.

Sharif’s second poetry collection elaborately constructs a forbidding yet alluring labyrinth ... Sharif uses line breaks to succinctly make a point, then challenges the reader to gather the will to go on to the next emotion or the next obstacle to understanding from the subject’s point of view ... The effect is like a patch of empty wall between images both ancient and contemporary ... The hallways and arrows of a customs office offer but one interpretation for the elements in this increasingly poignant and important collection. Sharif demonstrates remarkable talent in her ability to so deftly portray the traumatizing balance required to live in the West with deep roots in Iran.

... alternately scathing, funny, resigned, and transcendent ... Whether probing the arbitrary power of a U.S. customs agent or the language to which one defaults, speakers confront the gulfs between self and home. The fragmented long poems of the second and third sections effectively utilize absence and space to mirror these ideas ... Blistering in its clear-sightedness, this collection offers a fierce, beautiful closing that dares to imagine 'a beckoning, a way.' A bold and uncompromising book with virtuosic emotional range; highly recommended.

Sharif movingly excavates in her powerful second collection an internal landscape haunted by psychic dissonance and fractured identity ... Sharif captures the bleak shape that everyday objects can suddenly take on when one is in a dark mood ... Many poems are addressed as letters to a person called Aleph, the first letter in the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, and in one particularly striking example, the poet contemplates systems of power through the lens of Ethel Rosenberg's execution. Sharif's commanding voice reverberates throughout this complex and confident collection.