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Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Finalist, Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award
In this affecting poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan—queer and mixed-race—confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “ who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves .”
With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zürich to London, through history to the present day, this book is, on its surface, an uncompromising exploration of identity in personal and collective terms. Yet the collection is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.
Finalist, Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award
In this affecting poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan—queer and mixed-race—confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “ who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves .”
With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zürich to London, through history to the present day, this book is, on its surface, an uncompromising exploration of identity in personal and collective terms. Yet the collection is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.
92 pages, Paperback
First published January 20, 2017
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650 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
May 11, 2019
Somehow in the quagmire of poets on Facebook Charif Shanahan and I became friends in cyberspace, then we were Lambda finalists in 2018, where I hoped to meet him in person, but that didn't happen. So at AWP when I saw he had an offsite reading I went.
His book, also a NAACP Image Awards finalist, is a book of our times and necessary reading. He writes of identity, and the title of his book, "Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing," is apt for his entry to our world with an Irish father and a Moroccan mother; plus, he is a proud gay man. His very existence breeds identity issues, and through his bravery to write his truth we have a gift. In the poem, "At L'Express French Bistro My White Father Kisses My Black Mother Then Calls The Waiter a Nigger," this title his story.
How does he fit into this world, this family? In the poem "Passing" he writes, "If I arrive,//who will greet me as brother,/as owner, who will greet me//at all," There is angst, love, travel across continents, art; bridges to the issues that have plagued us across centuries with conflict and slavery.
The book is well tuned with some of the best literary minds behind him. His work offers a lens that is important to our future existence together. He gives excellent readings, is well loved by his students, who I sat next to at his reading. I look forward to reading more of his writing.
His book, also a NAACP Image Awards finalist, is a book of our times and necessary reading. He writes of identity, and the title of his book, "Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing," is apt for his entry to our world with an Irish father and a Moroccan mother; plus, he is a proud gay man. His very existence breeds identity issues, and through his bravery to write his truth we have a gift. In the poem, "At L'Express French Bistro My White Father Kisses My Black Mother Then Calls The Waiter a Nigger," this title his story.
How does he fit into this world, this family? In the poem "Passing" he writes, "If I arrive,//who will greet me as brother,/as owner, who will greet me//at all," There is angst, love, travel across continents, art; bridges to the issues that have plagued us across centuries with conflict and slavery.
The book is well tuned with some of the best literary minds behind him. His work offers a lens that is important to our future existence together. He gives excellent readings, is well loved by his students, who I sat next to at his reading. I look forward to reading more of his writing.
January 14, 2024
tender and gut-punching. so much heart it was hard to swallow.
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October 22, 2020Shanahan's debut collection is an intimate portrait of family, diaspora, colonialism and the self. From Morocco to America to Europe, these taut poems seem to be searching the world, asking the question: how do I fit or not fit into these faulty matrices of "identity" and family. Shanahan's style reminds me of Carl Phillips with its restriction and attention to disruption in its syntactical patterns. This collection exists fully in the realm of not-knowing and ambivalence, which, to my mind, is the most fertile place for poems to exist. I can't wait to hear more from Shanahan.
March 28, 2023
a tender exploration of self and what makes us
May 9, 2017
An accomplished collection of poems that are radically tender toward the self. Shanahan calls race and identify into question in complex ways. His narrative in turn catalyzes the reader to delve into her own familial, cultural, and geographical mythology to appropriately frame who she is and what that means in relation to those close to her.
August 8, 2018
One of the cover blurbs on this first book comes from Yusef Komunyakaa and that makes good sense; Shanahan writes in a lyrical mode cross-referenced with the confusions and complications of growing up as the son of an Irish American father and Moroccan mother. Several poems hinge on the question of whether is mother, clearly an African, is "black" and what the implications are for Shanahan. From "Single File:"
"The black slipped back into the body and suddenly I
Carried no weight at all, no memory
Of days drenched in white, no desire to white,
Because I was. I was
Becoming the dark thing they had never wanted me to be
And was, always."
The racial, cultural and familial tensions are heightened by Shanahan's gay sexuality, returning repeatedly to the question, framed in the title poem: "What pattern of occasion will free him?"
Favorite poems: "Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing," "Origin" "Persona Non Grata," "Single File," "As the Formless Within Takes Shape We Fail Again," "Haratin Girl, Marrakesh, 1968" and the long prose/poem hybrid: "Your Foot, Your Root."
"The black slipped back into the body and suddenly I
Carried no weight at all, no memory
Of days drenched in white, no desire to white,
Because I was. I was
Becoming the dark thing they had never wanted me to be
And was, always."
The racial, cultural and familial tensions are heightened by Shanahan's gay sexuality, returning repeatedly to the question, framed in the title poem: "What pattern of occasion will free him?"
Favorite poems: "Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing," "Origin" "Persona Non Grata," "Single File," "As the Formless Within Takes Shape We Fail Again," "Haratin Girl, Marrakesh, 1968" and the long prose/poem hybrid: "Your Foot, Your Root."
July 13, 2019
While traveling to Texas and Florida, I completed a book of poetry by Charif Shanahan, Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing, which explores themes on intersectional racial, and gay identity and how these identities affect relationships with ourselves and others. I often read poetry while traveling, enjoying the shifts in rhythm as the author bares their truth. Shanahan does not disappoint. Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing is not only a collection of dynamic, skillfully written poems, it is a journal to the development of a human soul. The words and imagery reflect the "otherness" lived by people who are not members of dominate social culture based on physical characteristics, and the unwelcome challenge when physical characteristics crosscut our distorted racial view of humanity.
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December 18, 2023“WHERE IF NOT HERE
All the photos taken those years
Show no people. Greek islands,
Vacant buildings and empty homes,
The bridge in Prague. All of it
Beautiful but veiled by distance.”
““We say asmar asmar—a chant of shame they cannot hear—
As the body changed with the earth and to contain it we must name it—
Asmar meaning dark,
Meaning Black, ….
Meaning I did all I could to free you why do you look back.”
“a triptych
at the Louvre
falls and shatters
into six;”
“At what point does the untrue become real
Is it when we give the thing a name How can we know
Who gets to say Does the thing have one name
For everyone Everywhere Do you see why it matters
I wish it did not matter Who gets to say”
All the photos taken those years
Show no people. Greek islands,
Vacant buildings and empty homes,
The bridge in Prague. All of it
Beautiful but veiled by distance.”
““We say asmar asmar—a chant of shame they cannot hear—
As the body changed with the earth and to contain it we must name it—
Asmar meaning dark,
Meaning Black, ….
Meaning I did all I could to free you why do you look back.”
“a triptych
at the Louvre
falls and shatters
into six;”
“At what point does the untrue become real
Is it when we give the thing a name How can we know
Who gets to say Does the thing have one name
For everyone Everywhere Do you see why it matters
I wish it did not matter Who gets to say”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 18, 2019
"Meaning *I did all I could to free you why do you look back*" ("Asmar")
". . . I need to learn/ not how to speak, but *from where.*" ("Song")
"sewing the two banks of skin across the thin blood river," ("Ligament")
I had to renew this one from the library just to spend more time re-reading; it gives a lot on the first pass but opens even more on multiple visits. (Or maybe I'm just a reader who needs that kind of time and immersion, but, for example, the line quoted above from "Ligament" fits neatly into the narrative of what's going on in the poem but also--also, isolated as a single line, becomes a symbol of the book's whole project: how to accommodate the blood of two shores?)
". . . I need to learn/ not how to speak, but *from where.*" ("Song")
"sewing the two banks of skin across the thin blood river," ("Ligament")
I had to renew this one from the library just to spend more time re-reading; it gives a lot on the first pass but opens even more on multiple visits. (Or maybe I'm just a reader who needs that kind of time and immersion, but, for example, the line quoted above from "Ligament" fits neatly into the narrative of what's going on in the poem but also--also, isolated as a single line, becomes a symbol of the book's whole project: how to accommodate the blood of two shores?)
July 6, 2021
A number of poems in this collection were beautiful, with illuminating questions, inspired turns of phrase, and a strong, earnest voice. There are a few key themes to this collection, including family, race and identity, and travel; these repeat, shift, take new forms and paths: the poems I liked were often the most fertile products of long, tangled exploration. i look forward to reading Shanahan’s further work.
July 26, 2019
3,5/5
Poemas de pertencimento étnico-racial e cultural, em que há sempre o confronto com as origens, pois filho de mãe negra nascida nascida no Marrocos e que se considera árabe, e de pai americano de origem irlandesa, o poeta, considerado branco, percebe-se negro.
Mas também são poemas que falam da procura de si (self), da percepção do outro, seja no retorno ao útero materno ou de peregrinações pelo mundo, sem a sensação de "casa".
Poemas de pertencimento étnico-racial e cultural, em que há sempre o confronto com as origens, pois filho de mãe negra nascida nascida no Marrocos e que se considera árabe, e de pai americano de origem irlandesa, o poeta, considerado branco, percebe-se negro.
Mas também são poemas que falam da procura de si (self), da percepção do outro, seja no retorno ao útero materno ou de peregrinações pelo mundo, sem a sensação de "casa".
January 18, 2022
Stunning. Ethereal imagery interwoven with prosaic gymnastics. A searing, scathing yet concurrently silent scream on the topics of race and sexuality. You are transported from New York to Marrakech via some of the most spellbinding, remarkable language….. highly recommend.
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April 25, 2022“In the spleen, an oasis,
An oasis as mirage.”
“I wait each night for a self.”
An oasis as mirage.”
“I wait each night for a self.”
April 26, 2023
There are several interesting poems on identity here, “Your Foot, Your Root” being one of the best in the collection, to me.
June 22, 2023
I was catfished by Irving Penn
April 23, 2024
"i want to enter my life like a room. blue walls. a floor painted green. three large windows. light."
this really might be in my top 5 favorite poetry books. ohmygod.
this really might be in my top 5 favorite poetry books. ohmygod.
June 24, 2019
Charif bares his soul in this slim collection of verse. However, while looking deep into his world, we see ourselves, our own questions about identity and the world reflected in his words, and in the empty spaces on the pages. It is a beautiful, heart-rending collection.
March 22, 2020
Charif’s poetry takes the reader on a journey through the complexity and simplicity of identity itself.
May 15, 2021
Favorite parts of poem:
Lower the Pitch of Your Suffering.
Lower the Pitch of Your Suffering.
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May 26, 2017811.6 S5283i 2017
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews