About this item
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 Zurich 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.
About the Author
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017) , winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems and translations have appeared in The Baffler, Boston Review, Literary Hub, The New Republic, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he holds degrees in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and Dartmouth College and an MFA in poetry from NYU. He has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Frost Place, the Fulbright Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Starworks Foundation, as well as Stanford University, where he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry.
