Shane McCrae Selected Works

In this collection, Shane McCrae expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career. McCrae invites readers to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. He also creates landscapes where Homeric figures mingle with those who populate the poet’s world. Helen weighs Paris’s spear in her hand and bloodies a raging Achilles; Penelope burns her loom each night; Dido watches Aeneas’s ship burn on the horizon. A strikingly original and engaging poet, McCrae continually surprises.

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 stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage. For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. Despite this, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.

Shane 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 specific pasts, he writes into and through the wounds that we remember and "strains toward a vision of joy" (Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books).

In his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories.” 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.

In The Gilded Auction Block, 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.

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 others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love.

This collection, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, further establishes Shane McCrae as an indispensible poetic voice. With his unmistakable cadences, he probes insistently yet big-heartedly into some paradoxes of belief and righteousness, confronting God from the quagmire of his upbringing: half-Black and raised by White supremacists. 

In Shane McCrae's Nonfiction the self is repeatedly re-figured as the site of rupture between truth and fiction, present and past, first-person and third-person—the rupture in which the dichotomies we live by, the dichotomies that erase us, originate. The speakers of these poems inhabit impossible situations, and the poems themselves speak neither of overcoming, nor of being overcome by, these impossibilities, but of the moment of equilibrium between extremes, the moment of uncertainty from which the future emerges. As McCrae writes at the end of his two-part poem on Solomon Northup, "in the darkness / I after a while couldn't be sure / My eyes were open." These poems assert, and foreground, possibility; the rupture they describe is hope.

"Probably the real story of race in the United States (like all real stories) can only be written by a poet. And Shane McCrae has done it. Blood is an epic that spans three centuries. Blood is so formally innovative that you don't quite understand how it achieves its effects. Blood is so utterly clear it makes you cry. Blood is almost impossibly empathetic. Moving from sequences based on slave narratives and Federal Writers Project oral histories to monologues by white racists to autobiography and the poet's family history, Blood is beautiful and significant, subtle and blunt. It asks to be read and reread. We need this book." —Kathleen Ossip

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