Description

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Longlisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
A New Yorker Essential Read of 2022
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
An NPR Best Book of 2022
A Literary Hub Best Reviewed Poetry Collection of 2022
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‘Witty and incisive… [Sharif] masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief’ New York Times
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The devastating second collection by Solmaz Sharif, author of Look, a National Book Award finalist

With Customs, Solmaz Sharif offers a series of poetic refusals, weighing nuanced questions about what it means to belong to a place. In the face of hard borders these poems seek a reckoning with the structures, in society, in language itself, by which these limits act on us.

Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal; to navigate a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that can become a relentless challenge; a mutating shibboleth.

Through the poet’s adept balancing of tonal and formal elements, these poems interrogate the ‘customs’ of the nation-state, of the English language, of the paces these systems put us through. But this work is not enjoined to a hopeless quest. Instead, the propulsive force that informs each line, each white space, and punctuation mark, is a powerfully galvanizing and healing force.

Customs reminds us of the generative possibilities of restlessness, of seeking in each poem to refresh what it is a poem can be and do.

Publisher Review

Witty and incisive... [Sharif] masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief * New York Times * I really love ... Solmaz Sharif's Customs. I love the book's precision and truthfulness and find I continue to turn to it for something like help -- R. O. Kwan * The Cut * 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 * New York Review of Books * Rooted in unrootedness; migration, borders and displacement are all themes in Sharif's poems. This book asks us to consider how powerful language can be, and to use it carefully * NPR, Books We Love * As she masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief, Sharif manages, with conviction and consistency, to make the reader feel welcome * New York Times Book Review * The ostensible clarity of borders and checkpoints gives way to a terrain of fundamental uncertainty, a geography of elusive thresholds * New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 * Dazzling . . . 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 -- Mandana Chaffa * Ploughshares * 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 * New York Journal of Books * 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 * Library Journal, starred review * Sharif's commanding voice reverberates throughout this complex and confident collection * Publishers Weekly, starred review * 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 * Booklist, starred review * Spectacular . . . 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 * Cleveland Review of Books * 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 * Harvard Review *