The World and the Self Through Another's Eyes

There's a school of criticism that prefers to read poems as though the identity of the author doesn't matter. And there's another approach that assumes the poet's identity is paramount and poems can be taken as authentic expressions of the author's race, gender, religion, or sexuality. Neither approach accounts for the poet's ability to shape the way identity is expressed in the work. There are many factors to consider. Should the poems construct a narrative, and should the speaker of the poems be depicted playing a role in that narrative? Should recognizably personal details be included? How much tactile, physical reality should be embodied in the poems? How much personal "voice" should the poems have?

One of the first questions a reader tends to ask is: "Who's writing this, and why?" The answers suggested within the work help to frame how the work will be read. Three recent debut collections by young poets undertake different ways of representing the self within their poetry and using it as a tool to comment on pressing contemporary issues.

In Look, Solmaz Sharif offers a defiant meditation on America's military actions in the Middle East, anti-Muslim prejudice, and the dehumanizing effects of warfare and violence. She tells stories of refugees, detainees, casualties, and survivors through fragmentary details and scraps of disembodied quotation. Some seem to be drawn directly from her own life and family history, while others seem to be reported or even fictional—but they're blended together.

The speaker of these poems is the daughter of Iranian émigrés, raised in the West, but also a person moving through a war zone, identifying bodies, clearing rubble; an angry observer of America's post-9/11 landscape from her vantage point in California, and also the lover of an inmate in Guantánamo, writing him tender letters scored with censored white spaces. In effect, she merges her identity with all who have suffered; she makes her voice speak for them all.

One of Sharif's major concerns is the use and misuse of language by those who wield power. Throughout the book, words and phrases from the Defense Department's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms are incorporated into the text, in all caps. Seemingly benign words take on sinister overtones when cast as military lingo, and the reader is drawn up short, wondering what specific meaning something like "THRESHOLD OF ACCEPTABILITY" or "READY POSITION" must have. Sharif describes a romantic moment in "Dear INTELLIGENCE JOURNAL":

We were FRIENDLY beneath the gazebo's LATTICE … a    LOW VISIBILITYOPERATION, which is what my OVER-THE-HORIZONRADAR was telling me.

The omnipresence of these terms, and the way they break into the text at seemingly random moments, suggests the way the language of warfare—intended to obscure and to distance us from the reality of state-sanctioned violence—infiltrates the language we all use, blurring our perceptions, and corrupting our judgment. In "Perception Management," the entire poem consists of a list of code names of military operations:

ALOHA * FOCUS * FLOODLIGHT * HARVEST LIGHT * RED LIGHT* RED BULL * PITBULL * BRUTUS *HERMES * SLEDGEHAMMER * GRIZZLY FORCEDENTRY * VACANT CITY * RIVERWALK

The names are by turns aggressive, whimsical, jingoistic, and deceptively gentle, highlighting the uneasy ability of language to both reveal and obscure, to evoke and deceive. Sharif is hyper-aware of her own responsibility as a poet to name things rightly, and the poems enact a constant struggle between irony and sincerity. The title poem, "Look," begins:

It matters what you call a thing: Exquisite a lover called me. Exquisite.

Whereas Well, if I were from your culture, living in this country, said the man outside the 2004 Republican National Convention, I would put up with that for this country;

Whereas I felt the need to clarify: You would put up with TORTURE, you mean and he proclaimed: Yes;

Three poets' different uses of identity remind us that what we see is impacted by the windows out of which we look.

Hillel Smith

Sharif refuses to sugarcoat anything. In...