Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing: Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Autor Charif Shanahanen Limba Engleză Paperback – 19 ian 2017
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Finalist, Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award
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 Zürich 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. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.
Finalist, Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award
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 Zürich 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. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809335770
ISBN-10: 0809335778
Pagini: 92
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.18 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
ISBN-10: 0809335778
Pagini: 92
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.18 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Seria Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Notă biografică
Charif Shanahan was born in the Bronx in 1983 to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother. He holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. His poems have appeared in Baffler, Boston Review, Callaloo, Literary Hub, New Republic, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem, the Frost Place, the Fulbright Program, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and Stanford University, where he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry.
Extras
GNAWA BOY, MARRAKESH, 1968
The maker has marked another boy to die:
His thin body between two sheets,
Black legs jutting out onto the stone floor,
The tips of his toenails translucent as an eye.
Gray clumps of skin, powder-light,
Like dust on the curve of his unwashed heel
And the face, swollen, expanding like a lung.
At its center, the sheet lifts and curves:
His body's strangeness, even there.
One palm faces down to show the black
Surface of hand, the other facing up
White as his desert's sky.
As if underwater,
He passes from that room into the blue
Porcelain silence of the hall, where the light-
Skinned women have gathered in waiting:
No song of final parting, no wailing
Ripped holy from their throats:
The women do not walk into the sun,
They hide their bodies from it
(those pale wrists, those pale temples):
They do not walk the streets,
They do not clutch their own bodies,
They do not hit themselves in grief—
SELF-PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE
If I said I did not want to live anymore,
Would you understand that I meant like this?
The years form a mythology I can almost explain.
I see in colors because they are always so much
A part of the problem:
A fire engine is a backpack and my father.
Dollar bill is headscarf, star and crescent.
Candy cane is barbershop and my choice of men.
Gray is skin, the bridge in the center of your eye—
Now, stirring milk into my coffee with a bent spoon,
I stir milk into my coffee with a bent spoon.
PASSING
At a station in a no-name town,
a blue-red coleus
blooms from a cleft in the track.
Too obvious, I say, out loud
to the window, to God,
to no one, rolling my white eyes
into my thick bright head.
If I arrive,
who will greet me as brother,
as owner, who will greet me
at all, feeling from my veins
the pull of our one long pulse—
Pissing into the metal bin, my waste
streaming out onto the track,
I laugh at the mirror, an animal,
unhinging, trying
to see what they see
in whatever I am standing here—Then
the train slides into a long tunnel.
The lights flicker off
and I am back inside my mother.
SONG
I wait each night for a self.
I say the mist, I say the strange
tumble of leaves, I say a motor
in the distance, but I mean
a self and a self and a self.
A small cold wind
coils and uncoils in the corner
of every room. A vagrant.
In the dream
I gather my life in bundles
and stand at the edge of a field
of snow. It is a field I know
but have never seen. It is
nowhere and always new:
What about the lives
I might have lived?
As who? And who
will be accountable
for this regret I see
no way to avoid? A core,
or a husk, I need to learn
not how to speak, but from where.
Do you understand? I say
name, but I mean a conduit
from me to me, I mean a net,
I mean an awning of stars.
LIGAMENT
Even after she cut into my shoulder
Coldly, with a scalpel, resetting my clavicle,
Tying it down with borrowed ligament and screwing it
Into place, even after she sutured me shut,
Sewing the two banks of skin across the thin blood river,
Watching me sleep the chemical sleep
Until tender and hazy I awoke—Even after all that,
What seems the least plausible is how
She had known, walking into that white room,
To put her hand for just a second in my hand.
[end of excerpt]
The maker has marked another boy to die:
His thin body between two sheets,
Black legs jutting out onto the stone floor,
The tips of his toenails translucent as an eye.
Gray clumps of skin, powder-light,
Like dust on the curve of his unwashed heel
And the face, swollen, expanding like a lung.
At its center, the sheet lifts and curves:
His body's strangeness, even there.
One palm faces down to show the black
Surface of hand, the other facing up
White as his desert's sky.
As if underwater,
He passes from that room into the blue
Porcelain silence of the hall, where the light-
Skinned women have gathered in waiting:
No song of final parting, no wailing
Ripped holy from their throats:
The women do not walk into the sun,
They hide their bodies from it
(those pale wrists, those pale temples):
They do not walk the streets,
They do not clutch their own bodies,
They do not hit themselves in grief—
SELF-PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE
If I said I did not want to live anymore,
Would you understand that I meant like this?
The years form a mythology I can almost explain.
I see in colors because they are always so much
A part of the problem:
A fire engine is a backpack and my father.
Dollar bill is headscarf, star and crescent.
Candy cane is barbershop and my choice of men.
Gray is skin, the bridge in the center of your eye—
Now, stirring milk into my coffee with a bent spoon,
I stir milk into my coffee with a bent spoon.
PASSING
At a station in a no-name town,
a blue-red coleus
blooms from a cleft in the track.
Too obvious, I say, out loud
to the window, to God,
to no one, rolling my white eyes
into my thick bright head.
If I arrive,
who will greet me as brother,
as owner, who will greet me
at all, feeling from my veins
the pull of our one long pulse—
Pissing into the metal bin, my waste
streaming out onto the track,
I laugh at the mirror, an animal,
unhinging, trying
to see what they see
in whatever I am standing here—Then
the train slides into a long tunnel.
The lights flicker off
and I am back inside my mother.
SONG
I wait each night for a self.
I say the mist, I say the strange
tumble of leaves, I say a motor
in the distance, but I mean
a self and a self and a self.
A small cold wind
coils and uncoils in the corner
of every room. A vagrant.
In the dream
I gather my life in bundles
and stand at the edge of a field
of snow. It is a field I know
but have never seen. It is
nowhere and always new:
What about the lives
I might have lived?
As who? And who
will be accountable
for this regret I see
no way to avoid? A core,
or a husk, I need to learn
not how to speak, but from where.
Do you understand? I say
name, but I mean a conduit
from me to me, I mean a net,
I mean an awning of stars.
LIGAMENT
Even after she cut into my shoulder
Coldly, with a scalpel, resetting my clavicle,
Tying it down with borrowed ligament and screwing it
Into place, even after she sutured me shut,
Sewing the two banks of skin across the thin blood river,
Watching me sleep the chemical sleep
Until tender and hazy I awoke—Even after all that,
What seems the least plausible is how
She had known, walking into that white room,
To put her hand for just a second in my hand.
[end of excerpt]
Cuprins
Contents
I
gnawa boy, marrakesh, 1968 3
trying to speak 4
plantation 5
into each room we enter without knowing 7
massa confusa 11
self-portrait in black and white 12
on this hard bench 13
bronze parrot 14
watermark 15
briefs 16
soho (london) 17
dirty glass 18
origin 19
II
wanting to be white 23
tippu tip on his deathbed in stone town 24
homosexuality 25
little saviors 28
eunuch 29
persona non grata 31
market 32
ticino 33
post-traumatic stress disorder 36
lower the pitch of your suffering 37
where if not here 38
lake zürich 39
x
saint-tropez 40
unbearable white 41
passing 42
III
clean slate 45
the most opaque sands make for the clearest glass 46
at l’express french bistro my white father kisses my black
mother then calls the waiter a nigger 47
single file 48
eunuch (pre-) 49
auction / roman girl 50
asmar 51
song 53
where if not here (ii) 54
preface 55
landswept 56
ligament 57
aqua 58
as the formless within takes shape we fail again 59
in prospect 60
haratin girl, marrakesh, 1968 61
trying to live 62
IV
“your foot, your root” 65
whiteness on her deathbed 72
notes 75
acknowledgments 77
I
gnawa boy, marrakesh, 1968 3
trying to speak 4
plantation 5
into each room we enter without knowing 7
massa confusa 11
self-portrait in black and white 12
on this hard bench 13
bronze parrot 14
watermark 15
briefs 16
soho (london) 17
dirty glass 18
origin 19
II
wanting to be white 23
tippu tip on his deathbed in stone town 24
homosexuality 25
little saviors 28
eunuch 29
persona non grata 31
market 32
ticino 33
post-traumatic stress disorder 36
lower the pitch of your suffering 37
where if not here 38
lake zürich 39
x
saint-tropez 40
unbearable white 41
passing 42
III
clean slate 45
the most opaque sands make for the clearest glass 46
at l’express french bistro my white father kisses my black
mother then calls the waiter a nigger 47
single file 48
eunuch (pre-) 49
auction / roman girl 50
asmar 51
song 53
where if not here (ii) 54
preface 55
landswept 56
ligament 57
aqua 58
as the formless within takes shape we fail again 59
in prospect 60
haratin girl, marrakesh, 1968 61
trying to live 62
IV
“your foot, your root” 65
whiteness on her deathbed 72
notes 75
acknowledgments 77
Recenzii
"A vital and profound new voice...."—Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
"Shanahan’s ability to translate precise meditations on personal identity into universal issues of race and ethnicity is spectacular.... We are lucky to have this collection."—Chicago Review of Books
"A master of shaping his dialectic through lyrical groundwork.... Calm and potent."—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Shanahan never makes anything mundane or belittled by comparison. He allows space for much to be consequential. People and things, violent or kind, arrive and inflect, whether by inches or miles."—The Paris Review
"Shanahan breaks fresh ground in this painfully raw debut, dissecting the self in its cultural context via speakers who fearlessly claim both vulnerability and culpability. Shanahan, the Bronx-raised child of a Moroccan mother and an Irish-American father, superimposes Morocco’s multiple colonial legacies over American racial politics. The opener, “Gnawa Boy, Marrakesh, 1968,” establishes an uncompromising documentary tone and a grasp of resonant polarities: “One palm faces down to show the black/ Surface of hand, the other facing up/ White as his desert’s sky.” Shanahan binds the personal and political in his deft free-verse lyrical suite “Homosexuality.” Meanwhile, “Passing” conflates the notion of ethnic camouflage with the experience of journey by train: “The train slides into a long tunnel/ The lights flicker off// and I am back inside my mother.” As locations—Ticino, Switzerland; Zurich; Budapest—fly by in chromatic snapshots, the travelogue turns psychological. Thematic symmetries, subtly sonorous internal rhymes, and emphatic cadences weave into a fine, fray-resistant fabric. The reader gets caught in mesmerizing “untold cascading reflections,” as if identity were the waterfall of which Shanahan writes in “Wanting to Be White.” Shanahan’s is a vital and profound new voice, and his eyebrow-raising interrogation leaves the reader with afterimages “as the eye/ after the shock flash/ still sees/ the lightning.”—Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
“Charif Shanahan’s Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing is a heroic first collection where an alert dialogue beckons us, and we risk entering. Here in these pages the politics of color is highly personal; in a time of bleaching creams and psychological erasures, where there’s an attempt to diminish the African, this poet confronts himself and family head-on, and in doing so, through wit and an astute sense of history, his poetry dares to affect the reader. These poems cross borders in the blood and through an imagination that challenges us. Each trope is made of feeling. We need Shanahan’s voice in this time of reckoning with ourselves as a complex nation, where each of us may understand implicitly when a speaker asks, ‘What pattern of occasion will free him?’”—Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of Water Clocks
“Charif Shanahan’s debut collection, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, is an intricate meditation on the complexities of identity, the difficulties of relationships—with parents, with lovers—and the search for selfhood, ‘who we are to ourselves.’ These are resonant poems, both searching and tender. The poet writes: ‘I’ll sit in silence, / drinking hot tea to scald the place / in my body where the pain roots.’ From that pain what remains is not merely the hurt but the light that emanates from the wound.”—Natasha Trethewey, former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Native Guard
“From Marrakesh to London to Zürich to our bedrooms and kitchens enters this song of grief and clarity of perspective that is sobering. Lyrical and unforgiving, Shanahan’s voice sees our bodies for what they are, in our streets, in our politics, in our beds, in our racist and ruthless empire where even the sky can be ‘ill-fitting, unhinging, barely awake.’ With Shanahan as our guide, we are given poems that speak straight at us, without patronizing; the pain gives us claritas of being this much alive. I believe Shanahan is a rare kind of poet because his voice is unrelenting and calm at once; he is both vividly empathetic and fiercely honest. The poems in this powerful book dare to see themselves (and us) clearly in this night.”—Ilya Kaminsky, Whiting Award–winning author of Dancing in Odessa
"Shanahan’s ability to translate precise meditations on personal identity into universal issues of race and ethnicity is spectacular.... We are lucky to have this collection."—Chicago Review of Books
"A master of shaping his dialectic through lyrical groundwork.... Calm and potent."—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Shanahan never makes anything mundane or belittled by comparison. He allows space for much to be consequential. People and things, violent or kind, arrive and inflect, whether by inches or miles."—The Paris Review
"Shanahan breaks fresh ground in this painfully raw debut, dissecting the self in its cultural context via speakers who fearlessly claim both vulnerability and culpability. Shanahan, the Bronx-raised child of a Moroccan mother and an Irish-American father, superimposes Morocco’s multiple colonial legacies over American racial politics. The opener, “Gnawa Boy, Marrakesh, 1968,” establishes an uncompromising documentary tone and a grasp of resonant polarities: “One palm faces down to show the black/ Surface of hand, the other facing up/ White as his desert’s sky.” Shanahan binds the personal and political in his deft free-verse lyrical suite “Homosexuality.” Meanwhile, “Passing” conflates the notion of ethnic camouflage with the experience of journey by train: “The train slides into a long tunnel/ The lights flicker off// and I am back inside my mother.” As locations—Ticino, Switzerland; Zurich; Budapest—fly by in chromatic snapshots, the travelogue turns psychological. Thematic symmetries, subtly sonorous internal rhymes, and emphatic cadences weave into a fine, fray-resistant fabric. The reader gets caught in mesmerizing “untold cascading reflections,” as if identity were the waterfall of which Shanahan writes in “Wanting to Be White.” Shanahan’s is a vital and profound new voice, and his eyebrow-raising interrogation leaves the reader with afterimages “as the eye/ after the shock flash/ still sees/ the lightning.”—Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
“Charif Shanahan’s Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing is a heroic first collection where an alert dialogue beckons us, and we risk entering. Here in these pages the politics of color is highly personal; in a time of bleaching creams and psychological erasures, where there’s an attempt to diminish the African, this poet confronts himself and family head-on, and in doing so, through wit and an astute sense of history, his poetry dares to affect the reader. These poems cross borders in the blood and through an imagination that challenges us. Each trope is made of feeling. We need Shanahan’s voice in this time of reckoning with ourselves as a complex nation, where each of us may understand implicitly when a speaker asks, ‘What pattern of occasion will free him?’”—Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of Water Clocks
“Charif Shanahan’s debut collection, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, is an intricate meditation on the complexities of identity, the difficulties of relationships—with parents, with lovers—and the search for selfhood, ‘who we are to ourselves.’ These are resonant poems, both searching and tender. The poet writes: ‘I’ll sit in silence, / drinking hot tea to scald the place / in my body where the pain roots.’ From that pain what remains is not merely the hurt but the light that emanates from the wound.”—Natasha Trethewey, former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Native Guard
“From Marrakesh to London to Zürich to our bedrooms and kitchens enters this song of grief and clarity of perspective that is sobering. Lyrical and unforgiving, Shanahan’s voice sees our bodies for what they are, in our streets, in our politics, in our beds, in our racist and ruthless empire where even the sky can be ‘ill-fitting, unhinging, barely awake.’ With Shanahan as our guide, we are given poems that speak straight at us, without patronizing; the pain gives us claritas of being this much alive. I believe Shanahan is a rare kind of poet because his voice is unrelenting and calm at once; he is both vividly empathetic and fiercely honest. The poems in this powerful book dare to see themselves (and us) clearly in this night.”—Ilya Kaminsky, Whiting Award–winning author of Dancing in Odessa
Descriere
In this powerful poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zürich 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. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of an urgent and necessary new voice.