In her 2016 book Look, Solmaz Sharif incorporates language from the United States Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms. This language expresses forces us to attend to the militarism present in our everyday lives showing how violence across borders bleeds into the imperial center. In her stunning poems Sharif deconstructs binaries between the intimate and the militarized, home and abroad, the self and the other, in a way that looks back at power and scrambles references. In what follows I will confine myself to looking at her title poem, “Look,” and, reading it alongside Lisa Parks’s Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror, I will show how they illuminate an intersection of various strands of contemporary feminist theory in a critique of “vertical hegemony” and American war making in the SWANA region. Sharif’s poems, push us to reconsider the politics of recognition and its connection to violence. She also proposes a way of confronting militarism in a material disruption or re-routing which resonates with contemporary grassroots refusal to let the destructive machines of capitalism take the quickest route.