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Customs

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description Customs Overview

Solmaz Sharif’s Customs (2022) is a poetry collection exploring themes of displacement and identity through the lens of language. The work examines experiences of migration and statelessness, particularly those encountered by immigrants and refugees. It offers a significant contribution to contemporary American poetry with its meticulous attention to bureaucratic processes and their impact on individuals’ lives. This collection resonates most strongly with readers interested in issues of immigration, cultural heritage, and social justice.

help Customs FAQ

Why is Solmaz Sharif's collection called Customs?

The title invokes both inherited cultural practices and the border authority that questions and classifies travelers. Airport arrivals, surveillance, exile, and the difficulty of returning to Iran all shape the collection.

Is Customs a follow-up to Sharif's Look?

Yes. Customs is Sharif's second collection, published by Graywolf Press in 2022, while Look appeared in 2016 and was a National Book Award finalist.

What is the role of airports in Customs?

Airports become spaces where migrants are watched, delayed, admitted, or kept behind barriers from waiting relatives. Poems such as 'Without Which' connect that bureaucratic experience to language, statelessness, and perpetual movement.

Does Customs include Persian as well as English?

The collection is written primarily in English but repeatedly tests English against Persian history, pronunciation, and family memory. 'Learning Persian,' for example, makes the English-speaking reader confront transliterated terms rather than treating assimilation as a one-way task.

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