Naming the Nowhere That Language Was Stuck In

IT is a terrible truth that war is rapacious. It is also true that even as it destroys, like any industry, it creates. Of particular interest here is the language it manufactures: code words, lexicons, policies, numbers that bleed confirmed kills and “collateral” damage. War teems with its own prolific chatter, revealing and obscuring its activities. In 2016, Graywolf Press published Solmaz Sharif’s Look, a debut collection that holds war and its brutal production of murder and language under blanching light. A keen work of documentary poetry, Look examines and repurposes the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a living (as in frequently updated) compendium of military terminology. Throughout Look, Sharif reveals how institutional argot is entangled in our personal lives, strangling some and binding many others ever more tightly to euphemistic erasure. In “Personal Effects,” she writes to her uncle:

Daily I sit with the language they’ve made

of our language

to neutralize the capability of low dollar value items

like you.

The language in capital letters is drawn from the military dictionary, a presence that occupies the poems in Look, which went on to be named a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry.

In March, Graywolf will publish Sharif’s , a collection in which documentary shifts to the periphery, making space for poetry that further amplifies the political in the personal, adding pressure to the lyric “I” with a voice that is “made of all people somehow.” finds Sharif diagnosing loss, particularly loss of desire and the loss of longing itself. These bereavements are in large part the effect of the poet’s trip to Iran in 2014, when the house belonging to her late grandmother was sold, puncturing Sharif’s sense of what “home” could be and leading her to suspect it may