The displaced person may be the defining figure of the twenty-first century, the primary victim of a rapacious global economy and the system of national borders and wars that supports it. Two compelling recent books of poetry, both shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Award, focus needed attention on the trauma of displacement, especially for an American audience inclined less toward empathy than to media-driven fear of others.
As if to counter both the puffed-up illogic of Trump-speak and the elegant drone of National Public Radio news, Solmaz Sharif’s Look and Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Being Human aggressively disrupt our expectations about what English language and poetry are supposed to do. Whether sampling official bureaucratese, shifting quickly through multiple viewpoints, juxtaposing extreme violence and deadpan humor, or refusing to fill in narrative gaps or be contained in tidy verse lines, this poetry is not easy or comforting. Instead it’s what Borzutzky repeatedly calls in his book “a bedtime story for the end of the world”—discomfort reading, perhaps, especially for those who expect a safe, stable home.
According to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, in 2015 the number of displaced persons—those forced to flee their homes due to war or persecution—surpassed 65 million worldwide, the highest number ever recorded and a four-fold increase over the past decade. In the hands of these two poets the concept of displacement echoes in broad and flexible ways, revealing not only its brutal physical violence but also its devastation of language, culture, identity, and psyche. More here.