The Iranian-American poet on puncturing comfort, staying an apostate and her teenage love of RL Stine
The poet Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents in 1983 and raised in the US, moving between Texas, Alabama and California as a child. Her first poetry collection, Look – a finalist for the 2016 National Book award – used vocabulary from a US Department of Defense dictionary to interrogate the language of warfare. Now she’s followed it up with Customs, which the New York Times called “witty and incisive”, adding that Sharif “masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief”. The collection will be published by Bloomsbury on 27 April. Sharif spoke to me from her home near UC Berkeley, where she is an assistant professor of English.
You said in a recent interview that you think of your poems as “laced with arsenic”. What are you seeking to do to your readers?
I don’t shy away from hurting the reader. There’s a lot of talk about writing as triggering and traumatic and I think it very much is. It exists in that moment of crisis, making that moment alive in us over and over again. And in that way, it’s mean and it’s hurtful. And I find it useful to just be very direct about that and take accountability. I do think that there are certain comforts and eases that must be punctured, that must be poisoned, quite frankly.
Customs by Solmaz Sharif is published by Bloomsbury (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
