Winner of the Whiting Award Winner of the Thom Gunn Award Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry
“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.
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.
Table of Contents
Colonialism / 1
Trace Evidence
“Mulatto” :: “Quadroon” / 5
Imago / 8
Thirty-Third Year / 9
Encounter / 10
Control / 11
Clot / 13
Talking with My Boss about Diversity and Inclusion / 15
Countertransference /16
Self-Determination with the Question of Race / 18
Infidelity / 19
Not the Whole Thing, but a Large Part of the Story / 20
Trace Evidence / 21
Two Rooms Down the Hall / 22
In the Basement of Sears & Roebuck When for the First Time I Pulled My Hand from Her Hand and Fled / 24
Exile / 25
Race / 26
My People / 28
Inner Children / 30
On the Overnight from Agadir / 35
Little Red Lighthouse
Little Red Lighthouse / 55
While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me / 60
Psychotherapy / 62
Thirty-Fifth Year / 63
On Exiting Universitätsspital Zürich, New Year’s Eve, 2015 / 64
