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A review by kawai
Look by Solmaz Sharif
5.0
Brilliant.
Mixes terms from the United States Department of Defense's dictionary into a wide range of prose poems that render the other side of America's Mideast policy: drone strikes from the villager's view, war news gathered from afar, the ways in which politics infect pop culture and warp the casual, unaffected mind.
Although Sharif's poems occasionally drift far from the rhythmic form I prefer (for example, a set of imagined, censored letters to a Guantanamo prisoner), they work within the book's purpose as a whole, to render a specific reality beyond the confines of basic poetry form. In this way, the book reads similarly to Claudia Rankine's CITIZEN, although not quite as fluid in its dabbling among forms.
A gorgeous, necessary, timely work.
Mixes terms from the United States Department of Defense's dictionary into a wide range of prose poems that render the other side of America's Mideast policy: drone strikes from the villager's view, war news gathered from afar, the ways in which politics infect pop culture and warp the casual, unaffected mind.
Although Sharif's poems occasionally drift far from the rhythmic form I prefer (for example, a set of imagined, censored letters to a Guantanamo prisoner), they work within the book's purpose as a whole, to render a specific reality beyond the confines of basic poetry form. In this way, the book reads similarly to Claudia Rankine's CITIZEN, although not quite as fluid in its dabbling among forms.
A gorgeous, necessary, timely work.