Trace Evidence: Poems

by Charif Shanahan

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE KINGSLEY TUFTS POETRY AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A GUARDIAN AND ELECTRIC LIT BEST POETRY 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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Gay, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Adult

100 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 21, 2023

Reviews

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

'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 the Omniscient Narrator in any art form is a complex intersection of privilege and the capacity to wield Western modes of knowledge production in the (reductive) service of a lone voice, in the language of Empire.

My synapses are still reverberating. Poetry has to be the most lacerating, epiphanic, intimate, embracing, confrontational, and quietly revolutionary art form out there.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 same time are able to feel so universal, despite Shanahan’s understanding to the unadorned aspects of life and putting it in crisp and razor-sharp details.

The book paints a picture, even if one gruesome, and allows the reader to open the door of vulnerability and hear the cries of pain and agony that we see Shanahan goes through in this book. We see him through love, through pain, through racism, and through heartbreak. And you feel all of these emotions within you, as if you yourself are living in it.

At times some of the lines were beautifully written, with great lyricism and benign descriptors. At times it also felt a bit essay-like, as if he was not only telling you a story, but also giving you the facts. I’m not sure if I loved that, though I still enjoyed reading those poems.

The book very much knew it’s purpose, and that is something I really appreciated. One thing I notice in many poetry books is that it runs all over the place, though this knew the messages it wanted to tell and it kept it going through the entire book. I loved that.

all in all: this a really good book. i highly recommend to read it once it comes out.

[no · Rating 4 out of 5]

lovely.

[mads · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 the themes surrounding race, queerness, desire, belonging. sort of reminded me of ocean vuong at times.

def a collection i'd like to own one day!

'race is fiction, naturally. biologically, i mean.
i am trying to say something about interdependence, which i don't believe in.
it implies separateness, which is false. i am trying
to say something about being varied expressions of the very same thing. the very same.'

[Christopher Louderback · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Corrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

""Racism" is not, etymologically, conceived as fear.

The -ism suffix forms action nouns of verbs, e.g., Baptism is the action noun of the verb baptize.

Race by this logic would be a verb root, racism the act is performing race.

The sinister connotation of "racism" suggests the "race" being performed by "racism" is sinister.

If "racism" exists to uphold the supremacy of the "White" racial category, Whiteness by this logic is sinister."

[Salem ☥ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I don't have any excerpts to share, except maybe:

“Your breath says go on, live;
The world says go on, die.
You go for a walk around the block.”

This collection simply didn't resonate with me at all. Trace Evidence reads more like glimpses from the author's life than actual poetry. I wouldn't say that it's bad as much as I would say I just didn't "get it."

There are multiple poems about Pornhub, blowjobs, or sex in general that are... attempting to be waxed poetically. They simply didn't do it for me. Not my type of poetry, but poetry nonetheless, I suppose.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

this collection. is spectacular i highlighted almost every line of every poem - really great work that thinks about blackness / race, masculinity, queerness. these lines are piercing

[Void. · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,75/5

This book came to me at the right time.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shoutout to my current poetry season

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trace Evidence is now among my favorite poetry collections I’ve read and it’s one of my favorite books of the year. I think sometimes you read books that feel necessary and cathartic at the point you’re in in life, and that’s what Trace Evidence is for me. Shanahan’s honesty about his aimlessness and inability to live in the present is simultaneously painful and relatable. In this way I think Trace Evidence does what much poetry fails in doing, which is finding the universal in the particular. Shanahan provides raw insight into his life while still reflecting burdens of the human condition that so many people trying to find themselves in their 20s and 30s can relate to. Really, truly, this is a marvelous collection of poems.

Some favorite poems include: Control, Inner Children, On the Overnight from Agadir (my favorite section), Little Red Lighthouse, Fig Tree, and Worthiness.

[Ville Verkkapuro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was interesting, very unique. Like flipping through a notebook of a poet. Not poetry in the least, I'd say, but wouldn't maybe categorise this as anything else, either. Somehow I felt like I was Woody Harrelson in the first season of True Detective, listening to a poetic, yet tortured soul beside me, driving through barren lands. This was so direct, so clear, so banal – yet very deep, rough and raw.
I'm very sure that I will return to this and Shanahan in general.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars

Good, but not sure it was great. Uneven in the way that many poetry collections are, with some poems being tightly honed pieces of art and others that felt like snippets pulled straight from the writer's notebook raw and unvarnished. The collection does pick up steam towards the end. I will definitely keep an eye out for Shanahan's future work, hopefully with a slightly more varied range of subjects matter.

[Megan Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had a bit too much self-awareness seeping around the edges of the work for me to feel the impact more completely. It also, at times, went to a philosophical/existential space and I lost any grounded feeling—I know that is also a tool to convey the same theme, but it felt heavy-handed. Still, there are moments to be felt quite keenly here.

[Carey Calvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trace Evidence is an elegant reflection of loss and longing. A collection not only unique in what informs it – most notably, in accessible queer and mixed-race context and a singular traumatic experience.

Trace Evidence has already been deified by the contemporaenous greats: Vuong, Limon, Trethewey.

“Astute, subversively reserved, revelatory and pulsating with truth.”

“Charif Shanahan is examining race and sexuality in ways I have not seen.”

Elegant: pleasingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner

… and I haven’t even opened the book yet.

The cover alone is mesmerizing.

The grass edges/outline the grave: Get to living!

Already adorned with a starred review, there will be more on the way when this collection is released on March 21, 2023.

I was fortunate to receive an advanced copy, and the words contained therein won’t allow me to take that for granted.

At 4:44 a.m., I read “Love” and forgive me for thinking of Jay, but Charif is from the Bronx, and NYC is NYC.

Don’t take yourself so seriously

And you will hear this on more than one occasion, “On the Overnight from Agadir,” the collection’s centerpiece, will draw you in to a bus accident in Morocco where Shanahan suffered a broken neck and almost lost his life.

Shanahan’s mother is from Morocco and this juxtaposition leads to some of his finest writing in this collection.

A tree/But do you see the roots when you look at a tree?

My mother says we are European

Has the mother been informed?

Of her Blackness? Or that of her children?

A nearly white brilliance. An almost permanence.

At once relatable and nuanced, Trace Evidence implicates a Donnie Darko quote (I’m a fan for life now):

“Destruction is a form of creation.”

You can’t ask me into a room/then tell me to stand in the corner

Your mother left you before she met you.

Where does the self hide when it hides?

Of Trace Evidence, the poem Little Red Lighthouse sums it up best:

You know what it’s asking you. You just don’t know how to answer.

[Peycho Kanev]

PRESENT MOMENT

All day I think about what to do with the day.
I walk down the street for a coffee and to think
About what to do after that. On the table
Someone before me has left a little
Saucer of salt, with a wooden spoon
Like a tiny oar in white sand. In time I walk
Back to my apartment. When I turn the key
In the front gate, at the bottom of the steep staircase
Leading up to our door, my left eyelid twitches twice.
Inside I know there are things I want to do
With Monday: They levitate in the field of view
My mind makes, opening, like fireflies,
Or those old yellow lanterns along the perimeter of a yard.
My mother calls from New York: Tomorrow is
The last day of Ramadan and I should be sure
To call her, to say Eid Mubarak,
Which I will forget to do for at least two days.
I hang up and scroll through my camera roll:
One distant lover, then a second, then a third, then
A shadow passes over the window. San Francisco gray
On the backside of the building, where my windows face,
Though on the front side, moments earlier, the sun touched everything
Enough to heat it a little, to burn it a little.
An oar. My roommate’s dog licks my ankle and I
Dress for the gym, though I have no interest in staring at a wall
For forty-five minutes while running suspended in the air
Beside all the gays I never could connect with
Despite my love of sex. I leave my apartment and go to the mall.
I buy two dress shirts and a pair of slacks, then leave,
Then go back in to buy a pair of gym shorts. In the bathroom
I know men who have shame, or like a rush, or both
Hawk the stalls looking for trade
Or stand at a urinal waiting
For something to happen, for someone to come
Take them away from themselves. I ride the escalator
Up and down. Am I really 35? What time is it?

[Renee Morales · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll have to return to this review with quotes at another time. This was really great! Very beautiful and Shanahan's intellectual experiments through verse were particularly special. The first and final poems were some of my absolute favorites––just so sharp and cutting, truly. That being said, this is absolutely personal taste but sometimes biracial poetry can rub me the wrong way and this is coming from another mixed-race person. I thought when Shanahan was being a lot more culturally specific his conversations of race and identity felt much more genuine and fully fleshed out. I loved reading him work through the burden and meaning of existence and self-acknowledgment, all the "I want to enter my life..." stuff, just so fucking real like I get that so bad.

I'll find the quotes later but the poem where he's making love to his partner and panicking about his place in the world and what everything meant yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and ten years from now. Real asf.

Y'all should read i blew through them, had a lot of fun!

[Luke Gorham · Rating 3 out of 5]

3½. Starts off very strong, then flags. Very uneven, and Shanahan's two preferred (and contradictory) "modes" of poetry — a Hemingway briskness of language where each line is a 7-word (+/- 2) sentence; a Mellvillian longwindedness wherein a individual poem consists of a single sentence, consisting of about 145 clauses — is just too transparently calculated to work. There are individual lines in this collection that are among the best I've read all year, for instance: "Joy, Gary says, is a feeling of profound gratitude— / And before I can ask what for—for having come / How far I have come. I celebrate my friend / And think at once: We should be grateful then / For surviving a country that makes of survival / A victory and not a right?" But there's also such grand indulgence to the style and language here, which inconsistently works, that I can't fully give it a pass, no matter how impressive it is in spurts and stretches.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve been on a bit of a journey the past month. I don’t like contemporary poetry but I’m trying to put in the necessary work to appreciate it (I am an English teacher, after all). This is the 16th contemporary poetry collection I’ve read in the past month.

That being said . . . I still dislike it. In one of Shanahan’s poems, his lover admonishes him, “Don’t take yourself so seriously,” and hands him back a draft of a poem. Shanahan should have heeded the advice. So much of contemporary poetry is just so overly serious, dealing with trauma, identity, and the end of the world. Where’s the joy? The humor? The silliness? The wittiness?

So much of contemporary poetry is simply free verse lyric poems about how life is so miserable (with a few “shocking” sexual references thrown in for good measure). I just don’t enjoy this.

Kudos for a cool cover, though, I guess?

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Encounter
A glance over the urinal divider and suddenly he drops
His boxers and takes my hand—

I ask him for his name and he says Brother,
Ain't no reason for you to know that.

He puts my hand on him, then in him
And the sound he makes...

(On the game show, a double beep from above, quick and sharp,
When the chosen letter did not appear in the puzzle.)

I wanted to know if he wanted me,
Then, once I knew that he did, I wanted nothing from him. (10)

---

Love
Don't take yourself so seriously
He told me, one morning, after sex

Handing back a draft of this poem.
It started differently then

Than it does now.
I am trying to decide if he was right. (75)

[Dolly Slinker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Standouts were: Worthiness, Fig Tree, and Wound

From Worthiness:
"Racism" is not etymologically, conceived as fear.

The -ism suffix forms action nouns of verbs, e.g., Baptism is the action noun of the word baptize.

Race by logic would be a verb root, racism the act of performing race.

The sinister connotation of "racism" suggests the "race" being performed by "racism" is sinister.

If "racism" exists to uphold the supremacy of the "White" racial category, Whiteness by this logic is sinister.

[Charity P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is so, so good. Damn. The kind of poetry where the poet uses conversational words and tone and then you're three lines past the line you're still thinking about and it's like "wait what holy shit" and you have to go back and read that wordplay again because it's real casual-like but not casual at all. See what I mean:

If to speak in a particular social world I must

Occupy a position and that world consists

Of positions that are clear but none

Of which clearly I occupy

Then it may be that I cannot even if I want to

Tell you what for me it has been like.

[laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don’t read much poetry, but when i do read it, i want it to be written like this. Shanahan has such a strong voice and took my breath away at multiple moments. these are just a couple of those moments:

“I am tired of apologizing for the heaviness of what I am required to discuss in order to live.”

“I try to be deliberate, to be present inside the time that partitions the day. Time is less a measure of what is, more a framework of control, a structuring tool; An hour reflects the notion that we belong and are separate at once.”

4.5 🌟

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I circle my worst fear in life, which is my life: What to do with it, how to shape it, and so on."

Great contemporary poetry. If you are in your thirties, chances are few poems will feel like you could have written them (except you could not, of course :)).

I discovered the author through the On Being / Poetry Unbound project/podcast. It's a fantastic resource o find out about new contemporary poets, so give it a listen!

[Rebecca Stoner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! This is such a powerful, fascinating collection of poems. I loved following Shanahan's mind as he explored how one finds meaning and wholeness in life and how we are separated and might unite with those we're taught are "other." The book was funny, incisive, and felt accessible while remaining intellectually formidable. Loved it! Wish it was twice as long.

I also really recommend the audiobook!

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reflection worth reading if you feel you don't belong is the gist of a review featured in this collection, and I think that about sums it up. Shanahan guides us through his struggles being black but also Moroccan, of how silly our ideas of race are. This was the most stimulating subject to me in the collection. A terrible accident he survived also plays a major role, as does his queer identity. The presentation and language were unfortunately lacking for me.

[Philip Kenner · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extreme feat of introspection and lyricism. In these poems, Charif Shanahan projects a constantly changing portrait of subjectivity and how it relates to our bodies and the various traumas they endure. The shifting first/second/third-person address induces a seductive, terrifying effect.

“Control,” “On the Overnight from Agadir,” and “Conversation in Long Future Time” are my personal favorites.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of poems centered on self-identity. Shanahan narrates his horrific bus accident as a kid, the struggles of being mixed, and the intimacy of queer desire. It is an honest exploration of anti-blackness, the fight for life, and the need for self-discovery and belonging. This exploration is not only continuous in reality but also within the context of this art. The poems felt incomplete and left me longing for more substance.

[Heather O'Neill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of poetry that I picked up. It deals a lot with racism and being a black/Moroccan man in the US. I didn't feel as though this collection moved me or resonated with me as much as other collections that I've read this year (Jose Oliveras' book I enjoyed much more). There were some that stood out more than others, but overall it was just ok. I do love the book cover!

[Mia]

"Gary leans across the couch to touch my chin...Try to love yourself, darling, He says, You're going to be here a long time".

"...Giving my lover head, I wipe my mouth with my shirtsleeve, like a child"

"I don't know why we (all of us) should want to live-
It's all so futile and banal. It's all so pointless, even when it's good-"