Shane McCrae is the author of In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was shortlisted for the National Book Award, The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), Forgiveness Forgiveness (Factory Hollow Press, 2014), Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), and Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), as well as three poetry chapbooks and one nonfiction chapbook. His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and other anthologies and journals. He has been awarded the Lannan Literary Award, a 2011 Whiting Award in Poetry, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Columbia University.
-
MulePoemsFrom"The Survives"
And we divorced in the survives and O
It was a comedy and first you ever slept with me
And marry me and marry me and O
How fat I used to be
Mule:Poems -
MulePoemsFrom"Mulatto"
Grew up in Texas the only one in school
The only mule in Round Rock not in Round Rock
As much in Austin as in Round Rock but
Not in between the only mule at school
Across the street but there was one black girl
And one black boy much older boy forgot
Him but the girl called me a nigger let
The white boys touch the breasts she didn’t have
Mule:Poems -
MulePoemsFrom"[Grandmother O My Mother]"
Grandmother O my mother
Will lose her house in the spring
She doesn’t want another
House but she wants your things
To stay in the family
She can’t say what they are
Grandmother O a stray
Cat and some furniture
Mule:Poems
“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.” —The Rumpus
“To be born in the United States is to inherit the genealogical and cultural scars of its past. Shane McCrae takes us through the forced marches and dark passages of history with unrelenting audacity and courage. Crosses set on fire. People burned alive, their heads posted on stakes. Fighting to keep alive and to be free. Blood is an American legacy culminating in an engrailed crown.” —D. A. Powell
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Bookshop
- Print Books
- Bookshop
- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
- Bookshop
“This work has the rhythms of the ocean,” said the Whiting selectors on Mule. “We follow him out to sea, and the poems become increasingly poignant the farther out you get. You find yourself washed up on a shoal where the words, like a rock, break your heart.”