Verse Takes Flight: A Poetry Book Club at Lofty Pigeon Books

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Lofty Pigeon Books

Come read "Look" by Solmaz Sharif with fellow community members and bookseller Ienna!

Lofty Pigeon Books, Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA

<h3>It's our inaugural book club at Lofty Pigeon Books—just in time for National Poetry Month! We'll read and discuss Look, Solmaz Sharif's incisive and relevant collection from 2016 that examines the impact of war on our everyday lives.</h3>Get 10% off Look with promo code BOOKCLUB <a href="https://shop.loftypigeonbooks.com/item/SPJp5aJcEuAjsn7IHMm4iA" title="https://shop.loftypigeonbooks.com/item/SPJp5aJcEuAjsn7IHMm4iA" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">online</a> or by mentioning the book club at in-store checkout.<h3>About Look</h3>Solmaz Sharif's astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and also 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. At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. "Let it matter what we call a thing," she writes. "Let me look at you." Daily I sit with the language they've made of our language to NEUTRALIZE the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMs like you. You are what is referred to as a "CASUALTY." --from "Personal Effects"<h3>About Solmaz Sharif</h3>Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Shirley Shenker Chair of Arts and Humanities at U.C. Berkeley.

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Verse Takes Flight: A Poetry Book Club at Lofty Pigeon Books

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Verse Takes Flight: A Poetry Book Club at Lofty Pigeon Books

More events from Lofty Pigeon Books

Discover more events from Lofty Pigeon Books, from Community to other experiences you might love.

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