Solmaz Sharif’s first collection of poems, LOOK, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2016. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
Jan/Feb 2020
Of Today
A few days ago, I had lunch in Phoenix in a large, air-conditioned building, not unlike the large, air-conditioned buildings I’ve frequented in New York City or Los Angeles or […]
"Oh Abuse": Poets Regarding Pain
Jan/Feb 2016
Desired Appreciation
Until now, now that I’ve reached my thirties:All my Muse’s poetry has been harmless:American and diplomatic: a learned helplessnessIs what psychologists call it: my docile, desired state.I’ve been largely well-behaved […]
Nature's Nature: A Gathering of Poetry
May/June 2015
Inspiration Point, Berkeley
Consider Kissinger: the honorary Globetrotter of Harlem who spins on fingertip the world as balloon, the buffoon erected and be-plaqued here by the Rotary Club as evergreen and in this […]
Poetry
Spring 2013
Personal Effects
Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive. —Susan Sontag I place a photograph of my uncle on my computer desktop, which means I learn to ignore […]
Spring 2016
“To open like the ear, when eye is shut”: Philip Metres’s Sand Opera
I have been thinking of Anna Akhmatova. Namely “Requiem,” which opens with Akhmatova standing in a long line outside Leningrad Prison waiting to visit her son.
The Kenyon Review Credos
A Poetry of Proximity
The Kenyon Review Credos In his first State of the Union address, just months after 9/11, George W. Bush, as rhetoric requires, repeated, impassioned, a number of terms. With each […]
Solmaz Sharif
Solmaz Sharif’s first collection of poems, Look, will be published by Graywolf Press in July. She has most recently been selected to receive a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award […]
Solmaz Sharif
Solmaz Sharif is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University where she is working on a poetic rewrite of the U.S. Department of Defense’s dictionary. A 2011 […]