Trace Evidence: Poems

Praise for Trace Evidence: Poems

Searching. . . . he’s such a great poet, his particular experience resonates with any reader who’s ever wondered, ‘Why are we here?'
— The Washington Post

Searing. . . . a stunning meditation on intimacy, time, and our universal need for connection. Electric and urgent, Trace Evidence is about belonging, and how love can help us not only survive, but thrive.


— Chicago Review of Books

Exquisite and affecting. . . . an artistic vision that is dynamic and brilliantly conveyed.
— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Queer desire, death, and identity collide in this piercing collection.

— American Library Association, A 2024 ALA Notable Book

Monumental. . . . Gorgeous. . . . Expansive. . . . Deeply inquisitive and self-aware, the poems demonstrate a true mastery of form. . . . [and] reckon in surprising and unexpected ways with mixed-race identity, sexual intimacy, and the imbricated legacies of transcontinental colonialism.
— Los Angeles Review of Books

Brilliant. . . . A lyrical voice that’s at once pointed and poised.
— Guernica

His words are moving and muscular, with each line pulsating with wisely crafted feeling and thought. . . . [Shanahan] shows not just how a person is impacted by race but also how race is shaped by all of us, individually, in every moment.
— Book Page

Spectacular. . . . By turns wry, philosophical, and cutting, Shanahan lays bare the woes of contemporary America while offering glimpses of embodied joy.
— Buzzfeed

Emotionally vulnerable and insightful; a work in which all readers likely will find something of themselves.
— Library Journal, Starred Review

Gorgeously frank and delicate lyrics that both query and implore.
— LitHub

Trace Evidence explores mortality, belonging & race with glaring honesty & technical precision. Its urgency & timeliness make it one of the most important collections of the year. . . . The poems are rich with nuance and often demand that readers return to them, each time gleaning something new. . . . Charif Shanahan is one of the most vital voices in American poetry.


— The Poetry Question

Piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad.
— New York Public Library

A stunning tryptic that powerfully explores themes of mixed-race identity, time, mortality, and queer love.
— The Rumpus

Deeply personal yet rooted in the universal as Shanahan raises profound questions about human nature and what it means to feel displaced in the world.
— Zyzzyva

Trace Evidence is an astute, subversively reserved, and propulsive book, in which reverence for the line and its possibilities fashions an eros that's made new through precise yet concussive turns of phrases. All of which reminds you what sits at the heart of these poems: that 'you are actually very good at joy.' A truly magical achievement.


— Ocean Vuong, bestselling author of Time Is a Mother

Revelatory and pulsating with truth, Trace Evidence is a dangerously wise book of poems. Each poem is full of muscular music and meticulously carved out of longing as they ask, not just why we live, but how we live, and for whom. Wholly human and deeply rooted in attention, 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

Charif Shanahan is examining race and sexuality in ways I have not seen. Trace Evidence mines the most intimate reaches of our colonial past to ask these important questions: How do we live and love with so much betrayal? Betrayal of the self, by family, lovers, friends, the body’s betrayal of itself? Notably, the book contends with an anti-Blackness beyond the familiar narratives of our contemporary moment: here, it emanates from the Arab world through the very parent who confers Blackness to her children, offering nuance and complexity to the ways in which we tend to consider the subject. And while there is a through-line of pain in this book, as it explores the liminality of mixed-race identity, time and mortality, it neither ends in despair nor seeks to assign blame. . . . Charif’s is a necessary voice.


— Natasha Trethewey, 19th U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Native Guard

Ecstatic in their exactitude, crystalline in their wisdom, these poems remind me of the period after a great struggle, when body and psyche recover one another. Trace Evidence is an utter revelation.


— Tracy K. Smith, 22nd US Poet Laureate and author of Such Color: New and Selected Poems

In Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan writes a world. It is a whole world, a full world, because Shanahan knows what to leave out—his is neither a maximalist’s art, nor a minimalist’s art, but a completist’s art, an art that understands maximalism tends toward deception, and minimalism tends toward exclusion. A poet who is a completist is a welcoming poet, and in its treatment of some of the most divisive social issues of our day, Trace Evidence is a wholly welcoming book, a book in which a reader can live.


— Shane McCrae, author of Cain Named the Animal

Epic in scope, packed with emotional power, fiercely intelligent, sensual, erotic, audacious, tracing lineages of race and of family and of love, presenting the hard evidence of socially structured hatred and destruction, spiritually infused with human being: 'If you are on this earth / You are of this earth,' the poet insists, in a book brilliantly and beautifully shaped and alive with the hope that poetry alone can bring. I call out Trace Evidence for what it is: a masterpiece.


— Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems