Undergloom

In her fourth collection, Sharma writes from a place of disillusionment regarding the systems of exclusion, particularly racial systems of exclusion, at work in language, poetry, and especially academic life. She investigates the insidious ways that identity is anticipated and enforced, resisting “the tyranny of arrogance and the troubling of the tiny.” Motivated by events through which “The world had recast itself in such a way that I had to address the power behind it,” Sharma asks pressing questions about what is contained in the poetic “I,” exploring where it transgresses and where it capitulates to expectation. Proceeding with a lyric, analytical, and oblique relationship to personal narrative, the poems enact the graceful ambivalence of Sharma’s statement that “to find a salvageable concept/ in the word experience,/ we must embrace how it’s milky, how it’s unformed always.” Sharma locates her “I” within language and culture that constructs difference in every exchange, where “I can’t be like you/ because you are wrapped up in you/ in the purity of your you in orange,” where poets “claim words as objects for a kind of ownership feeling,” and yet remains “still here wanting to be the recipient of more human feelings/ from other human beings.” (June)