Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House), which is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was both longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. Shanahan’s poems appear in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and PBS NewsHour. Shanahan is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.
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Trace Evidence: poemsFrom"Exile"
It happened inside a single room.
For me. Forgive me
If you feel with this assertion I diminish you
Or the integrity of your story.
But it’s true: I was nowhere, there,
On the frayed brown carpet, between two beds—
Mine to the right, my brother’s to the left—
Counting the tiny holes
In the radiator cover, dark eyes
Piercing through painted-white metal.
When I looked around, I saw nothing that I was.
Not even other nothings, like me.
Do you think I take from you?
I do not take from you, I am you.
Trace Evidence:poems- Print Books
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Trace Evidence: poemsFrom"Thirty-Seventh Year"
At the start of this narrative, I will pretend
Not to be alive, not to be
Speaking to you from the living earth.
To help you. I will pretend
The circumstances of our being
Here, together, are casual—
And not incidental
Of this awkward dilemma: How to coexist
When you would like me dead.
For simplicity. For lack of threat.
In this narrative, I will look
At you from a distance, as into the future,
No more real than I am,
Sitting here in my off-white body which I can feel
But is somehow less important, less
Urgent than the problem it poses.
Sometimes, when I write this kind of narrative,
My mind flees and all I see above is text
At once strange, because I don’t know
How to hold it, and familiar, because I wrote it—
Send out the memo, I’m nearly done here.
How much more of this life to live? Thirty years, if I’m lucky,
I bet. If my life ends, will my brothers’ finally begin?
Who made my mother? Who killed my father who lives?
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Trace Evidence: poemsFrom"While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me"
Specks of toothpaste fleck the mirror.
A fan spins dust in the hall.
I find this is it too vulgar to accept
So I wait for a new starting point
As though life will begin there and then.
Do you know what I mean?
Not what I’m saying, what I mean.
Is it possible my function is to hold
All the intricate, interstitial pain
And articulate clarity?
Tie a boat to my wrist, I sprout wings.
Give me a pair of shoes, I grow fins.
Once an hour I trick myself into focus:
I look into the glass as I look through it.
When the new beginning comes, what then?
Does life suddenly reset like an Atari?
Does meaning emerge
Assertively and without invitation?
The task is to live well enough with you.
But how? How do you know what you want
If you don’t tell you? If you don’t hear you?
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"Searching. . . . He’s such a great poet, his particular experience resonates with any reader who’s ever wondered, ‘Why are we here?’" —The Washington Post [on Trace Evidence]
"A master of shaping his dialectic through lyrical groundwork. . . . Calm and potent." —Los Angeles Review of Books [on Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing]
"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, author of Time Is a Mother
"Revelatory and pulsating with truth, Trace Evidence is a dangerously wise book of poems. Each poem is full of muscular music and meticulously carved out of longing as they ask, not just why we live, but how we live, and for whom. Wholly human and deeply rooted in attention, this book is for anyone who has ever questioned where they belonged." —Ada Limón, 24th U.S. Poet Laureate
In these elegant poems, Charif Shanahan sets out to discover how a person should live. His laboratory is the fierce, complex pull of attachment and separation from his mother, his family, his beloveds; love turns itself, in his hands, into a crucible to understand other truths — about race, sexuality, belonging. His lyrics confront subjects from eros's intimacies to encroaching violence. These urgent questions are explored with reserve and exactitude, granting us a clarity that's profound.