Look

　　Daily I sit
　　with the language
　　they've made
　　of our language
　　to NEUTRALIZE
　　the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMs
　　like you.
　　You are what is referred to as
　　a "CASUALTY."
　　--from "Personal Effects"

　　Solmaz Sharif's astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family's and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed in America's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discrimination endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.

　　At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of DefenseDictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. "Let it matter what we call a thing," she writes. "Let me look at you."

作者簡介

　　Solmaz Sharif has published poetry in The New Republic and Poetry, and has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.