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.

The Gilded Auction Block: Poems

Literature & Fiction

McCrae, Shane

Poetry

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems

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 InSometimes 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.

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 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 re-create images of our shared and specific pasts, McCrae's work moves into and through the wounds that we remember and "strains toward a vision of joy" (Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books). Cain Named the Animal expands upon the biblical, heavenly world that McCrae has been building throughout his previous collections; he writes of Eden, of the lost tribe that watched time enter the garden and God rehearse the world, and of the cartoon torments of hell. Yet for McCrae, these outer bounds of our universe are inseparable from the lives and deaths on Earth, from the mundanities and miracles of time passing and people growing up, growing old, and growing apart. As he writes, "God first thought time itself / Was flawed but time was God's first mirror."

Cain Named the Animal: Poems

About the Author\nShane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award, Sometimes I Never Suffered, which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and his most recent collection, Cain Named the Animal. McCrae is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.\nSpanning religious, historical, and political themes, the seventh collection from the award-winning poet\nI think now more than half 
Of life is death but I can’t die 
Enough for all the life I see\nIn 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.\nSometimes 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 Many Hundreds of the Scent: Poems

Cain Named the Animal

FSG Adult

A stunning new collection of poetry from Shane McCrae, winner of the Whiting Writers' Award. Shane 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 his readers to "the thin king / who eats the world," McCrae invites them to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. In brutal, sorrowful lines, he recounts being kidnapped by his white supremacist maternal grandparents from his Black father as a boy. "O reader, listener, stay," McCrae writes. "You are now evidence." In The Many Hundreds of the Scent, 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--the collection includes a series of poems about the advent of post-rock and Hex, the debut album of the English band Bark Psychosis. With this collection, he has once more crafted an extraordinarily affecting book of poetry. As Kate Kellaway writes in The Guardian, "In McCrae's hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through."

The Many Hundreds of the Scent

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 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. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.

In the Language of My Captor

Humor & Entertainment

Wesleyan University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McCrae, Shane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McCrae, Shane

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McCrae, Shane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Gilded Auction Block: Poems

Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems

The Gilded Auction Block: Poems

Cain Named the Animal: Poems

Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems

The Many Hundreds of the Scent: Poems

Cain Named the Animal

The Many Hundreds of the Scent

In the Language of My Captor

In the Language of My Captor