Behold - Shara McCallum

Born of the poet’s longstanding love of visual art, especially painting, Behold examines why we love what we love, and how we see (and are seen) by art. When we say we “saw” something, McCallum asks, what is it that we saw—outside of us, and within?

Over two years spent working on this book, McCallum traveled to museums in the U.S. and abroad with the explicit goal of standing before works of art created by contemporary Caribbean, Black, and women artists. The resulting collection works to untangle what it means to locate oneself within the frame—to imagine belonging by entering the scene. 

Behold begins as a dialogue, a call and response traversing the territory McCallum is known for: history, interiority, identity, and the ways bodies present themselves in the world. These poems explore fulfillment and connection, the labor of seeking, the ache of loss, and the histories carried within the self. They are meditations on the existence of place within us, the way it is seeded within, and seeds us.