Cain Named the Animal
Poems
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- 42,99 lei
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- 42,99 lei
Publisher Description
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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Your English is dead yet it tugs away from you/ Like a strong dog fighting a leash," McCrae writes in his powerful eighth collection. For a collection that uses the word heaven often, rarely has salvation felt more tenuous. Building upon the biblical world that McCrae has fashioned across previous books, questions of life and death give rise to poems exploring the possibility of redemption, including a series in which a robot bird leads the speaker through hell, where the speaker's body is torn apart before being reassembled: "The coming back together was/ Agony greater than the flying/ Apart had been." There's something terrifyingly amiss but prophetic and necessary in McCrae's vision of the world, his spiraling syntax perfectly capturing contemporary peripatetic experiences in "Nowhere is Local": "I've never anywhere I've/ Lived before wanted to be buried where I've lived/ But have ignored live-/ long all my life the longest part of life." This dazzling collection tests the limits of language, memory, and mythmaking in wildly inventive, often devastating ways.
