The poet Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents in 1983 and raised in the US, moving between Texas, Alabama and California as a child. Her first poetry collection, Look – a finalist for the 2016 National Book award – used vocabulary from a US Department of Defense dictionary to interrogate the language of warfare. Now she’s followed it up with Customs, which the New York Times called “witty and incisive”, adding that Sharif “masterfully traverses the landscape of exile and all its complicated grief”. The collection will be published by Bloomsbury on 27 April. Sharif spoke to me from her home near UC Berkeley, where she is an assistant professor of English.
You said in a recent interview that you think of your poems as “laced with arsenic”. What are you seeking to do to your readers?
I don’t shy away from hurting the reader. There’s a lot of talk about writing as triggering and traumatic and I think it very much is. It exists in that moment of crisis, making that moment alive in us over and over again. And in that way, it’s mean and it’s hurtful. And I find it useful to just be very direct about that and take accountability. I do think that there are certain comforts and eases that must be punctured, that must be poisoned, quite frankly.
In Customs, we get a sense of the speaker slipping between the US and Iran and not feeling as if they belong in either country. Have you ever felt at home in the US?
I’ve never felt at home anywhere. And I think that’s a very ordinary existential crisis. My entry happens to be this material reality of two nations that are very clear “enemies” and that ask for clear and rehearsed allegiances. And all of that feels false to me. This has led to larger questions of: what is the state of exile? What are the various shelters that this questing and that language itself may be able to offer to us? How do we find it within ourselves and among ourselves?
There’s a scene in your poem He, Too in which a US customs official derides your occupation and you get your own back by portraying him as this pink, puffy presence stuck in a plexiglass box – and stuck, too, in a poem making an anti-American argument. How did it feel to write that? Did it feel like you were seizing back power?
There’s definitely a level of self-satisfaction that one can derive from writing a poem like that. I don’t know that there’s necessarily a power that is immediately taken back. That would be a dangerously limiting assertion for me to make, because I do think there are very immediate and literal powers in one’s lived life that one could and should take back that would make the job of the officer obsolete. But that aside, yes, there’s a power to the ancient and future orientation of poetry that the national bureaucracies are unaware of. And I do take, on bad days, a smug satisfaction in that and on better days a kind of comfort.
Some of your poems about Iran feel nostalgic, but with a sense of the impossibility of ever satisfying that nostalgia.
Yeah, my relationship to Iran is almost entirely one of projection and of wondering about a past that one has never seen, that is only imagined. I’m very sceptical of nostalgia, but I’m also drawn to it; it’s a central theme or tonal reality of my life. I’m hoping to find newer ways to articulate what that longing is.
Do you find that writing poetry eases your sense of dislocation?
No.
Do you feel part of any community or scene within American poetry?
Not any scene, no. I am painfully transparent and I think people know where I stand at all times and I don’t expect anyone to be standing with me. There are many writing today that I am close with – Roger Reeves, Marwa Helal, Ari Banias - or any number of friends that I send poems to. But it also always feels like… I think it is very important to know when to betray community. I’m more of an apostate than anything.
When do you write?
In the mornings. I free-write, longhand. I set it aside for months to let it ferment and then I take the notebooks out and look at them again. And whatever causes surprise, I gather into another document and I start to move it around. I’ve said often that I wish I were a film editor, because editing is my favourite thing. It’s nice when I get to turn into a reader of my own work rather than the creator.
What have you been reading lately?
I’ve been revisiting William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All and TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. I’m not a fan of Eliot’s, but I do love that book. I was also rereading John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. It’s a beautiful book. I’m working on a long-form… I’m just calling it a statement of poetics to make it easier on myself for now – so I’m revisiting various formal and actual models for that. They’re all outstanding.
Are you reading anything purely for enjoyment?
I hardly ever read for enjoyment [laughs]. It’s terrible. I feel like I’ve ruined it for myself. The last series that I read and thoroughly enjoyed and wanted to read again was Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.
Who are your literary influences?
June Jordan and Muriel Rukeyser. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Forough Farrokhzad, because I’ve been translating her work for myself and that’s really affected my writing. Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a huge influence also.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
Voracious. I always had books at parties. I always had a book with me in the car. Shel Silverstein had a huge impact. Emily Dickinson I read young – about 12. My mom gifted Dickinson to me. I read a lot of scary RL Stine books too. I read widely and for pleasure.
Customs by Solmaz Sharif is published by Bloomsbury (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
