Look: Poems

Solmaz Sharif utilizes the United States Department of Defense's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms to critique the language of state-sponsored violence. By integrating terms like "clearance," "casualty," and "loss" into verses about the Iranian diaspora and the Iraq War, she demonstrates how bureaucratic jargon sanitizes the destruction of human life. The poems focus on her family’s history, life under surveillance, and the lasting effects of warfare on domestic spaces. She reframes tactical definitions to expose the brutality inherent in the sterile vocabulary used by the American military machine.

Readers interested in the intersection of linguistics and state power will find a structural analysis of how governments weaponize everyday speech. This collection is for those who study the evolution of political dissent and the impact of conflict on private memory. The reader gains a visceral understanding of how official terminology erases personal identity while learning to recognize the hidden violence within political rhetoric. By the final page, the reader possesses a new framework for deciphering the euphemisms of modern warfare and the physical reality they obscure.