Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan. Tin House Books, 2023. 112 pp. $16.95 (paper)

“I want to tell you what for me it has been like,” says Charif Shanahan in the opening line of “’Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon.’¹” Two and half pages later, the poem just trails off—two conjunctions and no punctuation: “And so ”

The blank remainder of the page is merely blank. Once you decode the nothing there, you should be done.

But I’m not. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

It’s the kind of move that, in most books, I’d find frustrating—cheap.

It’s part of a book, Trace Evidence, that’s full of things I’d expect to find frustrating—disappointing, flat.

And I’ve been trying to figure out why I mostly don’t, why this book has ended up mattering so much to me. Because I get the feeling that there’s a crack in my idea of what poetry is and how poetry works, what it can be and what it might do.

*

The poem’s second sentence, like every sentence after it, rests much of its weight on words that would sit comfortably in a theory seminar:

To speak at all
I must occupy a position

In a system whose positions
I appear not to occupy.

Why does that move me? Why, after numerous readings, do I still want to reread these lines, and this poem, and the book in which they appear?

It’s not that the situation they describe—a man, unable to bring his complex of identities into accord with any of the available categories, struggling to find a way to talk about himself—isn’t moving. But the terms they repeat–position, occupy–and the one they pivot on–system–are tangled in the bureaucratic impulses of literary academia at its chilliest: the terminology rectified, the experiences abstracted, codified, and filed, the boxes secure…. Why do these lines feel particular? Why do these lines, inside this poem, feel alive?

*

There are the signs of skill and attention: the way the sentence unfolds across line endings that reinforce the rigid march of logic, the neatly hinged mirror of occupy, position, the system, position, occupy…. I think that’s part of it. There’s something careful here, a sense that’s akin to the feeling of someone working something out–though not that: there’s too much control to imagine that the time of the poem is the time of the thought. It’s slower, more emblematic of writing than speech, the way he works to give these ideas shape, then rearranges them into a different shape, and another shape after that, and the way that makes credible the unmet “want” (“to tell you what for me it has been like”) the poem opens with. A felt need to get it right that gives their inadequacy an echo–that loneliness.

It is a lonely book.

Without the trailing “And so ,” “‘Mulatto’ :: ‘Quadroon’” would end with a revision of that opening want: “Then it may be that I cannot      even if I want to / Tell you what for me it has been like” (here, too, no punctuation). It’s a verbatim echo of the opening line, but the meaning, like the grammar, has changed. The first three words (“I want to”) are now adrift inside a dependent clause; everything else is subject to the near-negation of “it may be that I cannot….”

It’s a deft move, that dispersal of the unadorned desire the poem started with. More importantly, it’s touching; I’m moved: something in the stiffness of it, the lack of contractions, the phrase “for me” wedged awkwardly between “what” and “it,” makes both versions feel strangely human, lonely, naked, sad. Strangely, because it’s so thoroughly remote and so resistant to the customs of speech. That’s not how I habitually imagine poems work.

The subsequent “And so ” serves mostly to add an extra beat after the poem has come full circle, something to mar the neatness of that return. But somehow, that matters enough to make an otherwise-gimmicky gesture (the inability to speak enacted by simply choosing not to speak) worthwhile. It’s disappointing, yes, but the disappointment matters. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

*

The terms of Shanahan’s “position” are necessary but not sufficient: He’s a gay man, the son of a Black Moroccan-American mother (“An Arab from the Maghreb” who “in the United States, is racialized as Black”) who, as he puts it in one poem, sought out “the white blanket of my father,” a man “of Irish-Scandinavian stock.” The terms are not sufficient for a reader, for any human being, of course–they never are, though we cannot do without them–but especially for the version of Shanahan who is trying, in poem after poem, to find his way into his own life.

The terms, in these poems, never add up. Sometimes, the poems don’t add up either. That’s one of the risks of writing the way Shanahan does: the bare authority: an almost-prophetic tone at times; the commitment to words and phrases too generic and too sanctioned to seem spontaneous or alert; the iron causality hardening the joints…. When the poems fall flat, everything in them feels flat–aimless and overdetermined at once. But that’s not surprising. What’s surprising is that they often–more often–enchant. That I am often enchanted by poems that have those qualities, as, for example, in the opening lines of “Not the Whole Thing, But a Large Part of the Story,” with their audible refusal to get carried away:

Over there, she was sahrawi, asmar
Even abid. Over here, Black.

To her, Black meant African American,
Which she was not.

(She was thinking about history, not color.)
(She was thinking about language, not history.)

Hence, the pocket of nowhereness
Into which she pushed him out of her body

Onto a land she had brought her body
To willingly, which was part of the problem.

For Shanahan the speaker and Shanahan the subject of the poems, the failure of the terms for one’s identity is intolerable. He isn’t glibly untying the presumed potentials of language. He isn’t trying to perform the flaws in words. He’s reckoning with a life of experiences that define his life by denying him–by denying and degrading his experiences, especially his experiences of Blackness—in the very terms he needs to explain them. For example, this passage from “Countertransference,” in which Shanahan is addressing a former therapist:

Which was, to me, I had confided to you, the saddest practice–
When we do to one another what has to us been done
Pulling in, pushing out, etc.—

Until finally, three months in, you said the thing I had all along felt you feel:

I am a Black man

Hand opened across your chest
To say without saying

You are not what you think you are–

Something similar happens with his mother–happens over and over again with his mother–though here it’s more complicated. His mother’s presence, her desire to make him safer, happier, more successful, more like the life she sought for him in conceiving him with his white father (who, Shanahan reminds himself at the end of the poem, “Chose her too, / And over his own family”), by making him less black, binds everything inside of obligations he can’t dismiss and can’t abide:

When she tells me not to put forward that I am Black, she is saying I love you.
She is saying I want you to live. I see now. When she told my brother she wished
He’d just find a nice blond girl and settle down, I took her by the face
And, staring into her even-keeled nonchalance,
Told her I love you and you are crazy.

There’s more to it than the dislocations of race and the systems that define race–of the world “of positions that are clear / but none of which I clearly occupy.” There are the more elemental hungers those systems, for Shanahan, impede: for love, sex, belonging. For meaning. In these poems, Shanahan can never find satisfaction. Instead, he works to give disappointment, loneliness, and despair (and the starched propriety of the academically minted and sanctioned terminology we so often default to when talking about race, politics, class, sexuality, and the like) a sufficient shape. The relentless shapes of logic (many poems hinge on terms like that “‘And so”: “Hence,” “So that”) and the attendant sense of inevitability–the exhausted procession of demands, compromises, appetites, and imperfect options that in several poems leads to him accusing himself of banality, of wanting things that are too basic, too ordinary, in too-ordinary terms–becomes both the knot and its unraveling, as in “Imago,” where he addresses a former lover:

Stay, I repeated. Stay. And each time I said it
You stepped further away.

The poem ends with the beloved speaking and Shanahan interpreting the beloved’s speech. Kindness turns into confirmation into the consolation of clarity and form, and the final line slips into iambic pentameter, the occasional ghost of meter that drifts through these poems becoming corporeal:

I wish you a good night and all the joy you can build
Into the time ahead, you said. And what I heard, what I knew

You were saying was, I will not figure
Into the time ahead, which I expected to hear,

In some way–and so
The feeling was not one of loss, exactly–

Though I have lost, and lose–
But completion. The loss had occurred, I think,

Before we tried to give ourselves a name.

In that second-to-last sentence there is, as in so much of the book, a combination of patience and urgency–which, in Shanahan’s handling, ends up sounding a lot like authority. The two moments of resolution (“not loss… / but completion,” “The loss had occurred… / Before we tried to give ourselves a name”) seem to emerge from that combination–and to heighten it, to elevate it.

Often, reading these poems, I hear echoes of Frank Bidart and Louise Glück (the latter of whom Shanahan thanks in the book’s acknowledgements), as in “Psychotherapy,” which begins:

For all the years            you have yourself            submitted

                          To this process            energetically, at first, then

                                    Incredulously, exhausted—

                                                            It may be

All you needed to hear

                                         You heard in the very first office

Here, and elsewhere, it feels as if rigorous attention has scraped away detail, lending an almost metaphysical sense of importance, and the lines slip free of their potential to grow rigid by a careful balancing of sentence and line, so that a slow pulse emerges, a quality like breathing as they unfold…. I think that’s part of it, too. The necessary terms (as well as the transient ones–including the language of therapy and self-help, which Shanahan and his interlocutors keep returning to, often apologetically), the terms that constrain and refuse him, are sufficiently under Shanahan’s control for him to give them a second shape, but that shape seems to have its own life, independent of his hope for it. The most he can do is to keep it alive.

The book’s centerpiece is the long poem “On the Overnight from Agadir,” in which Shanahan tries to make sense of a solo trip to Morocco where a fatal bus crash broke his neck. One early section ends “If you don’t want to live you don’t want to live anywhere.” The next one reads in full:

Avoiding what? The–I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to say it–meaninglessness.

So that is why you get on a plane and go to the third world for a year?

I don’t know. Clearly I don’t know. And the third world as a phrase is so–

Did the colonizer kill or make thrive? Did the colonizer kill or make thrive?

Honestly. Who cares? I don’t need history to justify me. I just want a dog.

The poem feels almost aimless at times. Loose, sifting. Looking for somewhere to stand. One sentence might sound prophetic, the next like something from an inspirational poster. But something larger gathers in that. Something large is almost always gathering here. It is an ambitious book.

At one point, Shanahan recalls himself exclaiming, as the bus flips over, “My work!” “I have not done my work!” Later, he ends a list of possible interpretations of the event (all of them, he claims, “trite, lacking, uncompelling”): “It is not your work, silly boy. If you will not do it, your gifts will be passed to another.” The statements don’t really cancel out: both assume the work matters immensely.

It matters, it seems, enough to try to get it right. For all that these poems cannot say, that may be the one thing they communicate most persuasively. Art makes it possible to share loneliness without diminishing it; it has the potential to make meaningless meaningful. That doesn’t mean that either is unaltered by the making. To redeem is always to exchange. But it is also to validate: this thing matters enough to make it into something else, something capable of life. Which can then validate the new thing–a poem, poetry–in turn.

Much of the loneliness and confusion Shanahan assembles in Trace Evidence is an inheritance. “What you believed about yourself is what others believed about themselves refracted through you,” he claims at one point, addressing himself. That inheritance includes the idea of rightness, of a “True Self,” of belonging, as well as a belief that poetry–“the work”—matters at least as much as whatever we might ask a poem to redeem. I’m not always sure that’s right, but I’m often drawn to poems in which it feels true–while still feeling sufficiently answerable to our unpoetic experience to be plausibly human. That, I think, is part of what these poems, in their elevated encounters with banality, disappointment, injustice, and despair, do. They ratify the possibility of meaning by taking meaninglessness so seriously—and by letting in enough life that the seriousness, however brittle and compromised, can sing.


^{1. [There is an earlier version of the poem here.]↩}