Customs: Poems [Paperback]

Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Finalist for the 2022 L.A. Times Book Prize for Poetry
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

InCustoms, 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. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itselfits foreclosures, affects, successesshe begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom.

Customsis a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.

With an anthropological eye, Sharifs reflections on freedom, consumerism and loyalty are at once witty and incisive. . . . 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.Jessica Gigot,New York Times Book Review

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 demonstrates remarkable talent in her ability to so deftly portray the traumatizing balance required to live in the West with deep roots in Iran.Michael Ruzicka,Booklist, starred review

Sharif's commanding voice reverberates throughout this comlƒW