Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
“Epic in scope, packed with emotional power, fiercely intelligent, sensual, erotic, audacious, tracing lineages of race and of family and of love, presenting the hard evidence of socially structured hatred and destruction, spiritually infused with human being: 'If you are on this earth / You are of this earth, ' the poet insists, in a book brilliantly and beautifully shaped and alive with the hope that poetry alone can bring. I call out Trace Evidence for what it is: a masterpiece.” Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems
Review
“Trace Evidence is an astute, subversively reserved, and propulsive book, in which reverence for the line and its possibilities fashions an eros that's made new through precise yet concussive turns of phrases. All of which reminds you what sits at the heart of these poems: that 'you are actually very good at joy.' A truly magical achievement.” Ocean Vuong, bestselling author of Time Is a Mother
Review
“Out of pain and loss, joy, sex, state-sanctioned violence, and nomadic longing, Charif constructs a comprehensive identity and an artistic vision that is dynamic and brilliantly conveyed.” Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, a Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award Finalist. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, and Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship Program, and the Fulbright Commission. An Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, Charif lives in Chicago, Illinois.