Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017)Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate othe...

VULTURE'S BEST MEMOIR OF THE YEARA NEW STATESMAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEARShane McCrae was born to a white mother and a Black father. At eighteen months old, he was kidnapped from his parents’s house. His maternal grandparents transported him to suburban Texas, wishing to hide his Blackness from him. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, believing they were doing what was best for Shane. While in their house, Blacknes...

Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poetI think now more than halfOf life is death but I can't dieEnough for all the life I seeIn 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 resident...

McCrae’s latest collection considers the nature of perception and experiments with form and punctuation.This is a book about perceiving and being perceived. The various subjects of these poems are viewed by an artist, a devil, a soul floating out of a body it had inhabited, a god fed up with her husband’s infidelities, and a father whose young child has COVID-19. The poems of Two Appearances After the Resurrection are haunted by the question of what one ou...

A prophetic new collection of poems from Shane McCrae, "a shrewd composer of American stories" (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)Writing you I give the death I takeI know I should feel wounded by your deathI write to you to make a wound write backShane McCrae fashions a world of endings and infinites in Cain Named the Animal. With cyclical, rhythmic lines that create and re-create images of our shared and...

**This program is read by the author.An incisive new collection of poetry on political and contemporary themes***I’m made of murderers I’m madeOf nobodies and immigrants and the poorand a whole / Family the mother’sliver 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 th...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T S ELIOT PRIZE 2020'Out of personal history, out of the history of an enduringly fractured nation, and out of the deep history of language, Shane McCrae is writing the most urgent, electric poems of his generation' Garth Greenwell'Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not c...

Shane McCrae, “peer to the peerless” (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.Of death the muse is death the muse of HellIs death the muse of Heaven I don’t knowO muse of where howcan I hope to goTo where I pray I’ll go sing at least tellShane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-ce...

'Beautifully up-to-date, old-fashioned work, where the dignity of English meters meets, as in a mosh pit, the vitality - and often the brutality - of American speech' Dan Chiasson, New Yorker'Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis' Rabih Alameddine

A TELEGRAPH BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023'One of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time' GuardianShane McCrae, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry, returns with The Many Hundreds of the Scent, an urgent new collection that brims with lyric force. He expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career; in addition to introducing ...

Vulture**’s #1 Memoir of 2023**An unforgettable, “lyrical and poignant” (The Washington Post) memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents.When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents st...

Vulture**’s #1 Memoir of 2023**An unforgettable, “lyrical and poignant” (The Washington Post) memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents.When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents st...