Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America.
... 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.
