Rapture
Poems
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Because I can never say anything
plainly. Because I always stutter
politely. Because there's always the chatter
before the kiss.
--from "In Need of Subtitles"
In this award-winning debut, Sjohnna McCray movingly recounts a life born out of wartime to a Korean mother and an American father serving during the Vietnam War. Their troubled histories, and McCray's own, are told with lyric passion and the mythic undercurrents of discovering one's own identity, one's own desires. What emerges is a self- and family portrait of grief and celebration, one that insists on our lives as anything, please, but singular. Rapture is an extraordinary first collection, with poems of rare grace and feeling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his debut, McCray, winner of the 2015 Walt Whitman Award, focuses on family, particularly on the ways modern romantic relationships can mirror those of previous generations. In mostly chronological order, he progresses from the meeting of "the unassuming black and the Korean whore/ in the middle of the Vietnam War," through his Ohio upbringing, to present-day America's struggles over racial and sexual identities. McCray mythologizes his parents, but presents them as outsiders, and in a relatively brief space, he addresses 50 years of family history while navigating the realities of being gay and biracial in America. The speed of this progression blurs the lines between parent and child. His parents' wartime romance feels quick, necessary, and unsexy. It is a world where the sound of a lover in a bathroom signals "more emptiness to come." It is also a place where the "ghosts present// in the DNA" are on display. McCray's poems about his childhood can drag, but he skillfully creates parallels between his parents' relationship and his own: "No line will ever begin,/ As I lovingly look at my sleeping wife.' " For both parents and child, time seems to have passed rapidly; relationships have become necessities that are also safe havens from the world outside: "A light from a porch nearby."
