Charif Shanahan

"In Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, poet Charif Shanahan explores the various ways in which we as a species inherit identity constructs, chiefly about race and sexuality, and how we navigate those constructs in the creation of our identities"--

Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing

A Chicago Review of Books Most Anticipated Chicago Book of 2023 “A truly magical achievement.” —Ocean Vuong In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection’s center sits “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem that chronicles Shanahan’s survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother’s birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.

Trace Evidence: Poems

“A truly magical achievement.” —Ocean Vuong In a powerful and urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan’s poems in Trace Evidence explore the complexities of mixed-race identity, the tension of queer longing, time and mortality, and the brutal legacy of anti-Blackness in the United States and abroad. At the collection’s center sits “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem about Shanahan’s journey to his mother’s home country of Morocco, cut short by a devastating bus accident that broke his neck—an injury he miraculously survived. In the aftermath, Shanahan ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and insists that the legacies of our violent colonial past, the “evidence” that persists in traces, are relevant to, and the responsibility of, everyone. Shanahan articulates the desire we all share for true intimacy and connection, and offers a language we might all understand in a world intent on classifying and dividing.

Trace Evidence

Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry Finalist, Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award In this affecting poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan—queer and mixed-race—confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves.” With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zürich to London, through history to the present day, this book is, on its surface, an uncompromising exploration of identity in personal and collective terms. Yet the collection is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.

Charif Shanahan

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