Trace Evidence

In a powerful and urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan’s poems in Trace Evidence explore the complexities of mixed-race identity, the tension of queer longing, time and mortality, and the brutal legacy of anti-Blackness in the United States and abroad. At the collection’s center sits On the Overnight from Agadir, a poem about Shanahan’s journey to his mother’s home country of Morocco, cut short by a devastating bus accident that broke his neck–an injury he miraculously survived. In the aftermath, Shanahan ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate.

With rich lyricism and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and insists that the legacies of our violent colonial past, the evidence that persists in traces, are relevant to, and the responsibility of, everyone. Shanahan articulates the desire we all share for true intimacy and connection, and offers a language we might all understand in a world intent on classifying and dividing.