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Sometimes I Never Suffered
Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poet I think now more than half Of life is death but I can’t die Enough for all the life I see In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America’s racial history, as well as his own. Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time’s manifold potential to mend.
The Gilded Auction Block
An incisive new collection of poetry on political and contemporary themes I’m made of murderers I’m made Of nobodies and immigrants and the poor and a whole / Family the mother’s liver and her lungs In The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book’s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy in this country, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.
Mule
Poetry. African American Studies. MULE is highly lyrical, obsessively incantatory, audaciously formal, and actually a very personal, very autobiographical book. In it, the author addresses his at the time failing second marriage (which he is no longer in), his son's autism, his own racial identity, and some of his beliefs about God. "Some books come down like gods dying to transform us out of our empty, shattered lives. MULE is such a book. Never shying away from sudden confusions of pain and beauty, Shane McCrae's questions are not why so much pain? why so much beauty? but, instead, how can they remake us? McCrae's is a living, breathing poetry made of wisdom and wrenching song." Katie Ford"
Forgiveness Forgiveness
Poetry. African American Studies. The follow up to 2013's BLOOD (Coldfront's book of the year), FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS is a visceral poetry collection that troubles the intersections of race, abuse, memory and history. Concerned with how the visibility of blackness can become an individual burden, FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS traces the lingering fallout of an identity informed by traumatic artifacts and events how the story of a story can be revised. FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS complicates the idea of family as nurturer and destroyer. A physical and haunting work of cathartic healing. "Shane McCrae's FORGIVENESS FORGIVENESS is song that writes wrongs until they ring with generosity. When the poet turns to trauma and difficulty for subject matter, he returns to us with an unflinching devotion to hope, to possibility bearing wisdom, sustenance. McCrae has again transmuted a legacy of violence into one of love because 'the promise / is / New life.'" Heidi Lynn Staples"
Cain Named The Animal
'In McCrae's hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through' Kate Kellaway, Guardian 'Confirms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time' Kit Fan, Guardian Writing you I give the death I take I know I should feel wounded by your death I write to you to make a wound write back Shane McCrae fashions a world of endings and infinites in Cain Named the Animal. With cyclical, rhythmic lines that create and recreate images of our shared and specific pasts, McCrae writes into and through the wounds that we remember and 'strains toward a vision of joy' (Will Brewbaker, the Los Angeles Review of Books). Cain Named the Animal expands upon the b...
Blood
"Shane McCrae's astounding third collection of poems, Blood, is a book of dramatic slave narratives that are written so close to the bone that every poem reads like an insider's account of what happened inside the burning frame of a history nobody read. This is a treatise about slavery in every conveyance of the word: slavery to the man, to the Klan, to the child, to the land, to a murderous heart, to bad thinking, to the betrayed and to the betrayer. And every poem seems to be written from the place of some final recognition, a reckoning: This is who I am. This is what happened to me. This is what happened to us, as a people." -- Review by Michael Klein, publisher's website.
Mule: 10th Anniversary Edition
Finalist for 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award. Finalist for 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award. 10th anniversary edition of Shane McCrae's groundbreaking first collection of poetry, MULE, first published in 2011. With new Poems by the author and an introduction by Victoria Chang. 'Imagine // welcoming the wound, ' McCrae writes in his frontispiece poem, 'The Cardinal Is The Marriage Bird.' McCrae not only acquiesces to the wound in Mule, but he revises the wound through language, and in the process, we are in the midst of beauty. I hope that a new generation of readers, through this tenth anniversary edition, will be able to experience the skillful contradictions within McCrae's language, ...
In Canaan
Poetry. African American Studies. In Shane McCrae's IN CANAAN, he inhabits the personae of the escaped slave Margaret Garner, who, in the mid-1800s, murdered one of her daughters in order to keep her from returning to slavery. "I couldn't stop/Hurting her because it hurt," writes McCrae in the voice of Garner, "Before that night I never had the chance to love / Anyone/ she was the first person I loved." McCrae composes in broken forms and shattered fragments, retelling a harrowing historical story through the imagined first-person point of view of its tortured and terrified heroine.
Dog Girl
Poetry. "In DOG GIRL, Heidi Lynn Staples dances on a tightrope strung between sense and nonsense, between adulthood and childhood, and the lyricism of her verbal acrobatics confounds and delights in the way only genuine poetry can. Staples takes the existing lexicon and wrenches words into position, then commands them to be other than what they were, much to the joy of her astonished reader" --Christopher Kennedy. The truth and beauty welcomed in DOG GIRL is that nothing lasts, nothing is complete, and nothing is perfect. Staples continues the Joycean, Steinian and even Shakespearean wordplay evident in her first book, channeling it through a dizzying collection of formal structures-"Janimerick" through "Decemblank," with haiku, sonnets, prose poems, nursery rhyme, and more. She draws her explicit subject matter from her own passionate and tumultuous marriage, her profound engagement with the nonhuman world, and a core-deep grief from a late-term pregnancy loss. Staples previously authored GUESS CAN GALLOP, which is also available at SPD.
Nonfiction
" Nonfiction is a welcome offering from one of the most stunningly original poets to emerge in the last few years. Using a hauntingly lyrical syntax that embraces stammerings and fragmentations, Shane McCrae gives us poems based on documentary accounts of slavery and imprisonment, as well as more intimate treatments of troubling subjects. Whatever their sources, the poems are 'nonfiction' in the most urgent sense, bringing to light some of our culture's most deeply disturbing truths."-Martha Collins
