Seattle Arts and Lectures: Solmaz Sharif

This is a reading by Solmaz Sharif.

Sharif is the author of the poetry collection LOOK, a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award and the winner of the 2017 American Book Award for Poetry.

Sharif’s LOOK, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discrimination endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.