Trace Evidence: poems
Winner of the Whiting Award
Winner of the Thom Gunn Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry
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 the poet’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.
An utter revelation.
—Tracy K. Smith, 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars
Dangerously wise…
this book is for anyone who has ever questioned where they belonged.
—Ada Limón, 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and author of The Hurting Kind
A truly magical achievement.
—Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother
A book in which a reader can live.
—Shane McCrae, author of Cain Named the Animal
A book brilliantly and beautifully shaped and alive with the hope that poetry alone can bring… a masterpiece.
—Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems