Updated Friday 11/3 at 10:30 a.m.

Unfortunately, Charif Shanahan had to cancel his festival appearance. This event will feature Anis Mojgani and Mindy Nettifee in conversation.

In his sixth poetry collection, The Tigers, They Let Me, Anis Mojgani‘s verses create the yearning for rebirth, thriving love—a love of self and tenderness in a sorrowful world. In Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires. Moderated by Mindy Nettifee (Open Your Mouth Like a Bell).

In his sixth poetry collection, The Tigers, They Let Me, Anis Mojgani’s verses create the yearning for rebirth, thriving love—a love of self and tenderness in a sorrowful world. Drawing inspiration from Rexroth and Lorca, Mojgani explores the joys of desire, both in the presence of others and during moments of solitude. These new poems reflect a touchless world, navigating the balance between loneliness and being alone. Mojgani invites readers on a voyage of intimacy, planting ideas with hope and openness, ready to witness the flowers that bloom along the way.

“Anis Mojgani is a gale force talent, a twirling dervish of lyric & the body’s music, a poet who gleefully spurns the boundaries of poet.”
– Patricia Smith, Kingsley Tufts Winner & Four-Time Individual Winner of the National Poetry Slam

In Trace Evidence, the urgent follow-up to his award-winning debut Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan continues his piercing meditations on the intricacies of mixed-race identity, queer desire, time, mortality, and the legacies of anti-Blackness in the US and abroad. At the collection’s center sits “On the Overnight from Agadir,” a poem that chronicles Shanahan’s survival of a devastating bus accident in Morocco, his mother’s birth country, and ruminates on home, belonging, and the mysteries of fate. With rich lyricism, power, and tenderness, Trace Evidence centers the racial periphery and excavates the vestiges of our violent colonial past in the most intimate aspects of our lives. In a language yoked equally to the physical and metaphysical worlds, the poet articulates the need we all share for real intimacy and connection, and proves, time and again, that the true cost of our separateness is the love that our survival requires.

“Revelatory and pulsating with truth, Trace Evidence is a dangerously wise book of poems. Each poem is full of muscular music and meticulously carved out of longing as they ask, not just why we live, but how we live, and for whom. Wholly human and deeply rooted in attention, this book is for anyone who has ever questioned where they belonged.”
—Ada Limón, 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and author of The Hurting Kind

Portland Book Festival General Admission Passes are required for entry into all events. Passes are $15 in advance and $25 day of Festival. Youth 17 & under get in FREE. All full-priced General Admission Passes include a $5 book fair voucher and entry into Portland Art Museum. Passes admit attendees to the Festival; individual events are first-come, first-served. More info here.