Staff Picks: Bangs, Barbie, and Bodies
Charif Shanahan. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
I worry that I never quite say what I mean. I think about this especially when talking (and writing) about books. Using language to describe other language is a strange task—the overlay of text on text makes it difficult to distinguish between what is true, what is deeply felt, and what only appears to fit. In moments of particular disorientation, I find myself returning to the poem “Song” by Charif Shanahan, and these particular lines: “I need to learn / not how to speak, but .” Here, I remember that my language has not appeared out of thin air. My parents’ voices, the landscape of my hometown, the local pronunciations, the topics and issues that were revealed and concealed by my neighborhood, my class—an abridged list of the many things that inflect my ideas and word choice. Remembering these tethers makes me imagine what, for how they remember and remind us of the bodies and voices that reach us at every turn. There’s the loneliness of walking at night and passing the sounds and lights of a gay bar; there’s more immediate physical touch, a man “slipping the tongue / through the body’s shutters”; there is violent homophobia and racism, everywhere. 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. When I read , I feel so precisely situated in a constellation. Whether the individual strands are clear or obfuscated, I am sure there is a web around me. I am beginning to understand, too, that it’s possible to cast out from here with intention. I look around and see if my words are beginning to build a that I want to be a part of, and continue speaking into.
