Nonfiction

Nonfiction is a welcome offering from one of the most stunningly original poets to emerge in the last few years. Using a hauntingly lyrical syntax that embraces stammerings and fragmentations, Shane McCrae gives us poems based on documentary accounts of slavery and imprisonment, as well as more intimate treatments of troubling subjects. Whatever their sources, the poems are “nonfiction” in the most urgent sense, bringing to light some of our culture’s most deeply disturbing truths.

-Martha Collins

Shane McCrae’s latest poems arrive in a cloud of dark music. Here is a new “nonfiction” one that sings the many truths of the body-race-marked, abused, and plundered. We awaken, with McCrae’s speaker, “chained to a ring in the floor” of an unknown room (read: stanza) wondering how a body can endure so much pain and still be “hidden in the air” a mysterious vessel containing both injury and hope. McCrae’s lyrics-finely-wrought, yet relentless in their strength-frame the ambivalent yields of our American moment. Is the darkness surrounding us a dangerous blindness, or “a warmer way to sleep?” In McCrae’s poetry, the answer to such questions always must be yes.

-Kiki Petrosino