Customs

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and the 2022 NPR Best Book of 2022, Customs is a powerful poetry collection by Solmaz Sharif that explores the complexities of exile and belonging. Through nuanced questions and poetic refusals, Sharif examines the structures that limit us, including the customs of nation-states, the English language, and the systems that put us through. The collection is a galvanizing and healing force, reminding us of the generative possibilities of restlessness and seeking in poetry.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 112 pages
Publication date: 27 April 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

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.

Weight: 120g
Dimension: 131 x 198 x 14 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781526655295