Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Jean Stein Book Award Longlisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public
Library Book Prize A New Yorker Essential Read of 2022 A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022 An
NPR Best Book of 2022 A Literary Hub Best Reviewed Poetry Collection of 2022 _______________
'Witty and incisive. [Sharif] masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its
complicated grief' New York Times _______________ The devastating second collection by
Solmaz Sharif author of Look a National Book Award finalist With Customs Solmaz Sharif
offers a series of poetic refusals weighing nuanced questions about what it means to belong to
a place. In the face of hard borders these poems seek a reckoning with the structures in
society in language itself by which these limits act on us. Sharif examines what it means to
exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal to navigate a continual series of checkpoints
officers searches and questionings that can become a relentless challenge a mutating
shibboleth. Through the poet's adept balancing of tonal and formal elements these poems
interrogate the 'customs' of the nation-state of the English language of the paces these
systems put us through. But this work is not enjoined to a hopeless quest. Instead the
propulsive force that informs each line each white space and punctuation mark is a
powerfully galvanizing and healing force. Customs reminds us of the generative possibilities
of restlessness of seeking in each poem to refresh what it is a poem can be and do.
