Sometimes I Never Suffered
Poems
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poet
I think now more than half
Of life is death but I can’t die
Enough for all the life I see
In 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stunning fifth book from McCrae (The Gilded Auction Block) is steeped in the truths of witness and imagination. In poems that wrestle, doubt, and syntactically and rhythmically double-back on themselves, McCrae writes of such characters as the "Hastily Assembled Angel," who "was/ Not God and could be wrong." McCrae's angel ponders a line that reads "in the midst of life we are in death," while Jim Limber, a recurring character, states: "I can't die/ Enough for all the life I see." These poems see the white world as it chooses not to be seen, and illuminate the contradictions, disappointments, and loneliness that comes with paying true witness. As Limber wonders: "If I've earned my reward where is the life where I can spend it." In these pages, heaven is an "ordinary garden" that has been "set free," and each poem transcends with feeling, particularity, and honesty. This newest collection continues McCrae's powerful examination into race, forgiveness, and meaning in America, making it an essential contribution to contemporary poetry.
