Solmaz Sharif

"DESTRUCTION RADIUS limited to blast site/and not the brother abroad/who answers his phone/then falls against the counter/or punches a cabinet door."

I cannot think of a better use for the techniques of found poetry than to recover the human costs of war from underneath the verbal slush of military terminology. Clichés really are life threatening.

According to most
Definitions, I have never
been at war.

According to mine,
most of my life
spent there.

This collection was complicated and challenging. Solmaz Sharif chooses to use words from the Department of Defense's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, printing them in caps so readers can easily spot them in the poems. It's an effective and jarring method of highlighting the ways in which words can have different meanings in different contexts.

A challenging read in the best sense, where Sharif appropriates the odd language and definitions from a DOD military dictionary, taking these utterly empty bureaucratic terms and interleaving them with stark images of violence and war. The emotional impact of these poems is deadened by the DOD terms, and then brought to shocking, contrasting life by the original language and images in other parts of the poems. The effect on me as a reader was one of disintegration and loss. I was left with show more an awareness that language itself has become deranged and cheapened--you see the cheapening directly in the ridiculously formal, empty military terms, but also you reach an understanding of how continuous violence deadens the reaction to any one atrocity, and where words describing any one atrocity lose their emotive power. There is a lack of faith in words to mean anything, in these poems. The poems feel like shattered pieces of meanings strewn about for me to pick up.

The collection also reminded me a little bit of Kathy Acker's fiction. Not in subject matter or even tone but rather, for its cynical, almost nihilistic take on the power of language to mean anything, to say anything. It's quite a feat to pull of an emotionally wrenching work of language while simultaneously doubting the force of language.

The collection resonated with me all the more because I have been thinking a lot about the hollowing-out of language during this US election year, where sometimes the rhetoric I hear from speeches and rallies reminds me of the 1984 gem:

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.” show less

The first poetry collection I've read this year, or maybe even longer than that. Wonderfully haunting and evocative, this collection of poems by Solmaz Sharif sticks to your soul like bubblegum on a sneaker. The words wound and pierce; mimicking the war in the Middle East which she writes so passionately about. Sharif proves that sometimes the pen can be mightier than the sword in this brutal, emotional, must read poetry collection. A must read for everyone, not just poetry buffs.