Trace Evidence

Winner of the Whiting Award
Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry

“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.