‘Personal Effects’
Abstract Solmaz Sharif’s debut poetry collection, Look (2016), has been hailed by critics for its formal experimentation and as a searing indictment of war. Using various words from the 2007 Department of Defense (DOD) Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Sharif highlights the sterility of the official vocabulary of the US military machine and the ‘war on terrorism’. The poet juxtaposes the DOD’s lexicon with reflections on personal relationships, family, love and loss along with traces of the multiple sites of home of an Istanbul-born, Iranian-American poet. In this essay, I argue that throughout the collection, the poet engages in a subversive, translative act; Sharif presents an intralingual mode of translation in which her poems destabilize the seeming neutrality and sanitizing effect of military vocabulary by consistently juxtaposing it with representations of the effects and consequences of violence, as well as images of intimacy, in order to articulate an anti-war stance.
