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.
