Practicing the Work of Worms: Lyric Voice and Grievable Lives in Solmaz Sharif's Look

Abstract

Abstract: This paper explores Solmaz Sharif’s debut book Look: her use of lyric voice; her identity as an exile; and her creation of Judith Butler’s “subject visibility” and “grievable lives” within Look. Sharif’s poems break new poetic ground, using erasure tactics, a complex lyric I, and the reappropriation of Department of Defense terminology. Sharif’s poems present multiple, contradictory speakers, and her use of the lyric mask evokes complexity and dialectical opposition. While these multifaceted lyric voices do not allow for clear answers within her work, it is precisely this conflict that creates subject visibility for Sharif’s lyric speakers. As an immigrant and intellectual exile, Sharif’s voicings of these individuals are both useful to create grievable lives and problematic as her poems speak for the other. However, this tension is precisely what makes Sharif’s work compelling. Rather than resolve and classify, Sharif’s work strains against categorization through bending the lyric form and voicing multiple speakers within the Iran-Iraq War and the “War on Terror.” Ultimately, this paper argues that Sharif’s brutal depictions of violence, grief, and loss require her western reader to LOOK (to “be receptive of an influence”), to engage with the other, to recognize all life in its grievable state, to recognize new possibilities, and to transform.