Bøger af Shane McCrae

VULTURE'S BEST MEMOIR OF THE YEAR A NEW STATESMAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Shane McCrae was born to a white mother and a Black father. At eighteen months old, he was kidnapped from his parents' 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, Blackness would always be the worst thing about him.Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is a revelatory account of what it means to be Black in America, written with virtuosity and heart by one of the finest poets writing today. It illuminates how we all might be made whole again, through a tireless search for the truth and the joyful pursuit of what we love.

"An unforgettable 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 stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage--all the while believing they were doing what was best for him. 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. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, 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. A revelatory account of a singularly American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is written with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. And it is also a powerful reflection on what is broken in America--but also what might heal and make it whole again"--

"An unforgettable memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents"--

An unforgettable memoir of a mixed-race child kidnapped and raised by his white supremacist grandparents

Praise for Shane McCrae'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 clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis'RABIH ALAMEDDINE 'McCrae's poems possess a self-reflective quality without being burdened by history . . . His poetry moves freely within the restricted syllabic lines, constructing a wild, vivid dreamworld of a lush green garden, where an angry robot bird leads us down an Edenic rabbit hole . . . It confrms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time, throwing punches at the English language and its hierarchical traditions'KIT FAN, Guardian 'A shrewd composer of American stories' DAN CHIASSON, The New Yorker'Shane McCrae has many gifts as a poet, but among his most hypnotizing is his ability to create poems that simultaneously blare and beacon . . . McCrae has been creating ambitious work that demands - earns - our attention. I often feel out of time when I am reading his words; they arrive with a Miltonic fury, and yet they are so contemporary and critical for our present, strange world'NICK RIPATRAZONE, The Millions

Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poet I 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 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.

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.

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."

'In McCrae's hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through' Kate Kellaway, 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 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.'

Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poet

'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 risqu ; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis' Rabih AlameddineI'm made of murderers I'm madeOf nobodies and immigrants and the poorand a whole / Family the mother'sliver and her lungsIn 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, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.

Poems about captivity, escape, and the possibility of freedom

Thiscollection, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award, furtherestablishes Shane McCrae as an indispensible poetic voice. With hisunmistakable cadences, he probes insistently yet big-heartedly into someparadoxes of belief and righteousness, confronting God from the quagmire of hisupbringing: half-Black and raised by White supremacists.