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Oct 17, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Shane McCrae
How many now a thousand I can’t look America a thousand still I said I couldn’t then I looked how could I not When I imagine Hell I see the dead Together in a lake I see a thousand About a thousand in a burning lake The only torment most of us remember But where we heard of it we don’t remember We us how many children did we take And keep are keeping though we’re better now Have voted ourselves better good enough To try to give them back and give up slowly How many now have most of all their...
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
msn.com | Declan Ryan |Tristram Fane Saunders |Luke Kennard |Lucy Thynne |John Clegg |Shane McCrae
Continue reading More for You Continue reading More for You
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
yalereview.org | Shane McCrae
Shane McCrae for Camille Ralphs The buzzing of the big fans in the night I heard the hornets growl they do not buzz I heard it somewhere where it was I was There far and years away from the loud white Corpse trailers was four years an eight-hour flight Two transfers far they growl and they eat bees They are invasive they are dangerous To English gardens heard it where I might Have strolled an English garden heard it when’s The news there I had talked the night before About the trailers for...
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
poetryfoundation.org | Shane McCrae
America I feel your guilty shrugging The cotton sliding from your shoulder clos -er to your throat I feel it at my throat America your dry but not unpleasant Cottony hands they’re sliding from the right And from the left they’re sliding up my chest From just above my heart and yes from to The right of it my heart feels like a col -lar tightening feels like I’m feeling it For you the iron collar of your shrug And guilty yes but guilty like a child Licking the chocolate from his fingers after...
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Mar 13, 2024 | 
conjunctions.com | Shane McCrae
03.13.24 Song and the Prayers of Men Ariadne struck the mastEnraged. She couldn’t sail, noOne had ever bothered toTeach her, but the ship wouldn’tBe still. She had awokenTo find Thesus dead, his crewDead, and at first she had feltRelief.
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Nov 3, 2023 | 
nyti.ms | Shane McCrae
NonfictionThe former poet laureate examines our country’s oldest wounds — and ongoing racism — through the lens of her own family’s experience. Nov. 3, 2023, 5:02 a.m. ETTO FREE THE CAPTIVES: A Plea for the American Soul, by Tracy K. SmithSince her first book of poetry, “The Body’s Question,” was published in 2003, Tracy K. Smith has been a writer to watch. Her poems and prose are forceful, intelligent and musical, earning her a Whiting Award and a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades.
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Nov 3, 2023 | 
lithub.com | Shane McCrae
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Initially, I had thought I would call this essay “On Small Turns.” After all, the thing I want to talk about looks small, at least. Then, I thought I might call it “On Meter and Small Turns,” since what I really wanted to talk about was meter. But I finally realized I wouldn’t want anybody to think the subject of this essay is small, comma though it is.
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Aug 1, 2023 | 
readinggroupguides.com | Shane McCrae
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping 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.
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Aug 1, 2023 | 
politics-prose.com | Shane McCrae
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.
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Jul 22, 2023 | 
nybooks.com | Jana Prikryl |Shane McCrae
A lot is happening at once, in different directions or even dimensions, in Shane McCrae’s sonnet “June 12, 2020,” published in our June 23 issue: the title refers to the day when a police officer fatally shot twenty-seven-year-old Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta; his name is spelled out by the first letter of each line of this acrostic; and the poem itself describes an incident in McCrae’s childhood, when he was sent out to kill a rattlesnake in the backyard.
