Customs: Poems

I said what I meant

but I said it

in velvet. I said it in feathers.

And so one poet reminded me

Remember what you are to them.

Poodle, I said.

And remember what they are to you.

Meat.

—from “Patronage”

In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif...