Cain Named The Animal

(Paperback)

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'In McCrae's hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through' Kate Kellaway, Guardian

'Confirms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time' Kit Fan, Guardian

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 recreate images of our shared and specific pasts, McCrae writes into and through the wounds that we remember and 'strains toward a vision of joy' (Will Brewbaker, the 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.'

Author Bio

Shane McCrae's most recent books are Sometimes I Never Suffered (2020) which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, The Gilded Auction Block (2019) and In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the William Carlos Williams Award. He has received a Whiting Writer's Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.