Customs: Poems

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

In Customs, 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 itself--its foreclosures, affects, successes--she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom.

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

Author: Solmaz Sharif
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 03/01/2022
Pages: 72
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.3lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781644450796


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/17/2022
Library Journal 03/01/2022 pg. 140
Booklist 03/01/2022 pg. 8