Back Draft: Charif Shanahan

All of us carry wounds in one form or another. Sometimes those wounds are visible to the people around us; sometimes they stay concealed. And sometimes the wound itself is a painful reflection of how one is seen or unseen, all the ways that one’s identity might be fitted and forced into a particular frame.

Charif Shanahan’s poem “Wound,” from his brilliant new collection Trace Evidence, explores what it means to speak from a position that is “simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible.” His poetry examines how mixed racial identities take shape in the collective imagination, alongside the reality of their frequent erasure. With a lyrical voice that’s at once pointed and poised, Shanahan holds up a mirror to reveal the errors of society’s seeing.

Before we spoke, Shanahan asked if there was a particular poem of his I’d like to discuss. I suggested we could look at this one, a favorite of mine. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was looking at a broken sonnet, a poem concealing a wound of its own.

– Ben Purkert for Guernica

Guernica: Talk to me about where this poem came from.

All of my poems typically come from the same place: the ruminations