Behold - by Shara McCallum (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"In poems that address the concerns of the present age by calling for deeper and more focused attention, Behold confirms McCallum's powers as a veteran poet of compassionate meaning."
--Bocas Book Bulletin

"Shara McCallum's Behold moves through museums and galleries with a spirit of wonder and attention. These poems do what the strongest ekphrastic work does: they respond to art without explaining it, making something new in the space between looking and feeling. The collection traces a life lived in relation to visual culture--from the Impressionist reproductions beloved by the poet's grandmother, to art history classrooms, and conversations with artists and gallery assistants. This autobiographical thread gives the book its depth and mastery, as the speaker's inward life unfolds alongside the art. These poems are fiercely intelligent and musically alert, attentive to seeing as a form of thought. At the centre of the collection is Jamaica, the poet's birthplace, a steady point of return."
--Hannah Lowe, author of Chick

"Few contemporary poetry books begin with such unabashedly epic, rhapsodic, prophetic a voice as Shara McCallum's Behold. From here the journey takes us through Jamaica of the poet's childhood to ways of perceiving the interior--in museums, galleries, art studios of the world. This formally inventive book is a singing in defense of deeper contemplation. Having seen the "surreal landscape of history's graveyard" and understood "what it means to be a refugee in one's own country" the poet gives us wisdom. Through McCallum's clarity of perspective, her musical, memorable clarity, the soul stands apart, sees and is seen. With unrelenting honesty, here is a book that proposes we take a step back from the shallowness of our age and open our eyes--as the many painters and landscapes the poet finds herself in front of do--to behold the world that is ours. Behold. Behold. This is a beautiful, soul-making book."
--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

"Shara McCallum's Behold is the kind of book that first stunned me into the abiding love I have for language. At once mystical, political, and lyrical, these poems redraw the boundaries of what we might consider the limits of human insight. Poems like these remind us that, if there is ever to be a fully realized awakening in terms of our relationship to history, we need poetry."
--Tim Seibles, author of Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems

"In Behold, Shara McCallum moves as a curator would, assembling a museum of migration's afterlives--art haunted by the spectral presence of those of us grappling with migration's wake. Each poem is an object lesson in the root of curating, curare--to care: to gather what has been abandoned, to tend to grief through beauty, to attune to those silenced in the archives--the laborers in cane fields, the children left behind, the ancestors bound by red threads. To behold art shaped by migration is to witness both beauty and wound, rupture and repair."
--Grace Aneiza Ali, Curator

About the Author

From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold, forthcoming in 2026. Awards for her work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, NEA Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for No Ruined Stone, OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize for Madwoman, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for The Water Between Us, among others. McCallum teaches at Penn State University and served as the Penn State Laureate from 2021-2022.