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**A New Yorker Best Book of 2022** ''Witty and incisive. [Sharif] masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief'' New York Times The devastating second collection by Solmaz Sharif, author of Look , a National Book Award finalist With Customs , Solmaz Sharif offers a series of poetic refusals, weighing nuanced questions about what it means to belong to a place. In the face of hard borders these poems seek a reckoning with the structures, in society, in language itself, by which these limits act on us.Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal; to navigate a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that can become a relentless challenge; a mutating shibboleth. Through the poet''s adept balancing of tonal and formal elements, these poems interrogate the ''customs'' of the nation-state, of the English language, of the paces these systems put us through. But this work is not enjoined to a hopeless quest. Instead, the propulsive force that informs each line, each white space, and punctuation mark, is a powerfully galvanizing and healing force. Customs reminds us of the generative possibilities of restlessness, of seeking in each poem to refresh what it is a poem can be and do.>
