Review
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“[An] excellent debut collection. . . . In Sharif's rendering,
Look is at once a command to see and to grieve the people these
words describe―and also a means of implicating the reader in the
violence delivered upon these people. . . . An artful
lexicographer, Sharif shows us that the diameter of a word is
often as devastating as the diameter of a bomb.”―New York Times
Book Review
“Sharif’s skillful debut collection draws on a Defense Department
lexicon of terms.”―The New York Times Book Review,
Editors' Choice
“Remarkable. . . . By turns fierce and tender, the poems are a
searing response to American intervention.” ―The New Yorker
“A restless, gorgeous book of poetry.”―Jia Tolentino, The New
Yorker Page-Turner
“[Sharif's] poetry flicks between lyric and lexicon while still
sounding like music; in her hands, language is as pliant as
warmed wax. . . . It is the central miracle of Look that Sharif
shows us the real intensity of her conceit without veering into
triteness. She is, in turns, icy and searing, but consistently
fierce and beautiful.” ―NPR.org
“Sharif defies power, silence, and categorization in this
stunning suite. . . . In form, content, and execution, Sharif's
debut is arguably the most noteworthy book of poetry yet about
recent U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the greater Middle
East.”―Publishers Weekly *Starred Review*
“[Sharif] forces you to suspend yourself and consider your
relationship to language really deeply.”―NPR, All Things
Considered
“A powerful collection of verse. . . . [Sharif] turns a system of
language back onto itself. . . . remarkably profound.”―BOMB
Magazine
“[Solmaz] Sharif is poised to influence not only literature but
larger conversations about America, war, and the Middle
East.”―The Paris Review
“[An] impressive debut collection. . . . Sharif begins to replace
what has been displaced, or to recl displacement from official
state power. And it produces a vibrant, dissonant poetry that
refuses to calcify.” ―Boston Review
“An urgent collection. . . . [Sharif's poems] work at the more
radical of challenging the reader's complacency. . . . [They]
demand witness.”―Bookforum
“A brilliant dive into how war affects people and language. . . .
In the vein of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Look is, at its core, a
political call to attention: If we are to combat the effects of
war on people and language, we must first understand how war
permeates our society and culture. To this end, Look is not only
relevant, but eye opening.”―The Los Angeles Review
“Astonishing. . . . [Sharif is] a formidable poetic talent. . . .
Sharif casts the light of her imagination into the world's
darkest places.”―San Francisco Chronicle
“Look creates an after-image similar to that of Robin Coste
Lewis’ National Book Award-winning 2015 debut, Voyage of the
Sable Venus, with its meditation on the long aftermath of slavery
and diaspora. Like that book, Look feels like a disassembled
museum exhibit with the occluded stories ― the ones not told ―
written into view. Look, it compels you to do, and you will.”―Los
Angeles Times
“Though this is her first book, Look displays none of the
hesitations of a debut writer. Sharif is in command of her
abilities, the book at once complete and unified, but varied in
subject, tone, and form. It’s a distinguished
introduction.”―Literary Hub
“[Sharif] closes the distance between the trigger and the
wounded, between language and the body. She makes it impossible
to look away.”―The Margins
“Look is a book that disrupts, fervently and effectively. The
poems within are ic to complacency and linguistic hypnosis;
they constantly reach, inquire, prod, and wonder―sometimes with
force―and refuse to allow the reader to be lulled into the sense
that everything is okay in the world.”―The Rumpus
“Sharif’s writing is sparkling, precise, subtle, artful, and
true. . . . Through the fine achievement of Look, Solmaz Sharif
gives us the gift of her unflinching gaze.”―Kenyon Review Online
“Words can be powerful and Sharif uses them to their full
potential. . . . This is a brilliant book of poetry.”―MuslimGirl
“An important corrective against the weaponised rhetoric we now
confront daily in the media and in our personal lives.”―The
Poetry School
“Look is surprisingly tender for a book of such ferocious poetry.
. . . A deeply human attempt to rewrite the vocabulary of
war.”―Vox
“Sharif’s Look is ambitious, intelligent, moving, important, and
a little dangerous.”―Drunken Odyssey
“Sharif has been deeply and irreparably impacted by war and
injustice, and she is deft at modulating her voice in this
collection, scaling between broad, abstract critique and deeply
reflection.”―Fourth & Sycamore
“Creating poetry that is beautiful is hard, and so is creating
poetry that is socially important. Poets who manage to do both
simultaneously are treasures. In Look, Sharif provocatively turns
the veiled, euphemistic language of the American war machine
against itself by crafting poetry from words and lines in the
United States Department of Defense’s Dictionary of and
Associated Terms. The result is profound, at points humorous, and
sobering.”―Fourth & Sycamore, Best Books of 2016
“Raw, unsparing poems. . . . Highly recommended.”―Library Journal
*Starred Review*
“A complicated, commanding account of contemporary American life.
. . . The poems in Look shift between clear-eyed description and
exhausting wariness, painful in their honest assessment of the
destruction caused by our present conflicts and ways of being. .
. . Look has been published just when it is most needed. . . .
The work [these poems] do is utterly necessary. . . . To see
another person's humanness: Look calls us back to this most
simple, this most essential task.”―Harvard Review
“There are few books, whether debuts or not, to more anticipated
than the publication of Solmaz Sharif’s Look.―Literary Hub
“Sharif’s work transcends the standard tropes of political
poetry. Neither didactic nor angry, her poems delicately balance
sadness and loss, anxiety and fear and hope and humor. . . .
Illuminating and heartbreaking, Look demands that the reader pay
attention to their own relationship with the adopted, euphemistic
language of power, politics and destruction.”―Spectrum Culture
“Look explores the myriad ways how we go to war today
reverberates through communities and states and across the world
― taking a critical stance against the way humans wage war
against other countries, wage war with ourselves, and even wage
war against our own language and means of expressing (or not) the
inherent truths about our lives. . . . and
haunting.”―Bustle
“Sharif’s poems are rich with imagery; a single line of hers can
tell an entire story.”―Huffington Post
“As heart-wrenching as they are intriguing, these highly
anticipated poems are beautifully devastating.”―BookTrib
“Look achieves Wallace Stevens’ critical standard of poetry by
deftly responding to the true spirit of the time in which it is
written. . . . [Look] is no ordinary book. . . . Crossing into
such volatile aesthetic terrain charged with a radical decadence,
this collection threatens even the relevance of such superlatives
with obliteration. Quite possibly, it deserves to be called
dangerous.”―Colorado Review
“Urgent, prophetic, and virtuosic. . . . [Sharif] rages against
the dull machine of war by turning its weapons against it―into
poems with which she hopes to provoke a ing community out of
its ‘learned helplessness.’”―The The Poetry
“There is so much here that compels. . . . Sharif's collection
activates the role of observer by stunning back into awareness
the wounds that still suppurate, lighting the holes cut from
language and their respective tears in American thinking.”―The
Lit Pub
“Look demonstrates not only that language is an integral part of
the arsenal but also that poetry remains a subversive
act, arefusal to submit to despair or amnesia.”―The Critical
Flame
“Look opens the way for a new internationalist regard in American
poetry. . . . Solmaz Sharif has produced an extraordinary and
vital work of poetry.”―Puritan Magazine
“Solmaz Sharif’s Look is something great. She throws us a
brilliant, even perfect, book of poems sadly central to the
nightmare of today.”―Eileen Myles
“By unearthing, decoding, and reconstructing half-hidden symbols
of power built into nomenclature as well as everyday expression,
the poet serves truth―sometimes delicately, other times brutally.
. . . Each phrase pulls the reader into a system of being,
personal and historical, and Look, line by line, extends toward
prophecy and ('I am singing to her still') harmony.” ―Yusef
Komunyakaa
“Solmaz Sharif's beautiful and important poems patrol the
boundaries and limits of language. . . . I can’t remember a more
distinguished debut.”―Eavan Boland
“I haven’t been as excited about a first book of poetry for a
long time as I am about Solmaz Sharif’s forthcoming Look. . . .
This feels like an important book, not just a good one.”―David
Baker
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About the Author
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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.
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