On one particular day, a poem places events alongside each other, the ordinariness of each event casting the other events into light and shade.

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence: Poems (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. His work has been supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant to Morocco. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA graduate creative writing programs.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Charif Shanahan’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.