Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan
Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan
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Trace Evidence

Author: Charif Shanahan

Narrator: Charif Shanahan

Unabridged: 1 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/18/2023


Synopsis

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.

About Charif Shanahan

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Gerhard

'It is time to write. It is not time to write, Though one time, I am told, is as good As any time, right now as good as any now.' Fuck, this pulverised me. I read it during a single two-hour loadshedding bout in South Africa, where language, race, hegemony, decolonial deconstruction, and the role of......more

Goodreads review by Eric

Thank you to Tin House Books for providing me with an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book. All opinions are my own. This collection was a searing, exquisite work of art. Shanahan brings breadth and power within his words, even if minimal. The book tells stories that are so personal, and yet at the sam......more

Goodreads review by mads

thank u netgalley for the arc ! <3 i'm trying to get more into poetry this year and i think this was a good collection to start that with. i found so many of these pieces sooo v tender & honest and i rly appreciated so many of shanahans word choices, had to read a few lines over and over. i loved th......more

Charif Shanahan’s language exudes a kind of masculine tenderness, or a blunt softness — it is, at times, challenging, but it’s also inviting and, even within its sometimes dizzying phrasing, these poems offer a sudden familiarity, or a shock of comfort.......more