A stunning new collection of poetry from Shane McCrae, winner of the Whiting Writers'' Award.Shane McCrae, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry, returns with The Many Hundreds of the Scent, an urgent new collection that brims with lyric force. He expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career. In addition to introducing his readers to “the thin king / who eats the world,” McCrae invites them to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. In brutal, sorrowful lines, he recounts being kidnapped by his white supremacist maternal grandparents from his Black father as a boy. “O reader, listener, stay,” McCrae writes. “You are now evidence.”In The Many Hundreds of the Scent, Homeric figures mingle with those who populate the poet’s world. Helen weighs Paris’s spear in her hand and bloodies a raging Achilles; Penelope burns her loom each night; Dido watches Aeneas’s ship burn on the horizon. A strikingly original and engaging poet, McCrae continually surprises—the collection includes a series of poems about the advent of post-rock and Hex, the debut album of the English band Bark Psychosis. With this collection, he has once more crafted an extraordinarily affecting book of poetry. As Kate Kellaway writes in The Guardian, “In McCrae’s hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through.”

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 takeI know I should feel wounded by your deathI write to you to make a wound write backShane 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.”

A stunning new collection of poetry from Shane McCrae, winner of the Whiting Writers' Award.Shane McCrae, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry, returns with The Many Hundreds of the Scent, an urgent new collection that brims with lyric force. He expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career. In addition to introducing his readers to “the thin king / who eats the world,” McCrae invites them to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. In brutal, sorrowful lines, he recounts being kidnapped by his white supremacist maternal grandparents from his Black father as a boy. “O reader, listener, stay,” McCrae writes. “You are now evidence.”In The Many Hundreds of the Scent, Homeric figures mingle with those who populate the poet’s world. Helen weighs Paris’s spear in her hand and bloodies a raging Achilles; Penelope burns her loom each night; Dido watches Aeneas’s ship burn on the horizon. A strikingly original and engaging poet, McCrae continually surprises—the collection includes a series of poems about the advent of post-rock and Hex, the debut album of the English band Bark Psychosis. With this collection, he has once more crafted an extraordinarily affecting book of poetry. As Kate Kellaway writes in The Guardian, “In McCrae’s hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through.”

Shane McCrae, “peer to the peerless” (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.Of death the muse is death the muse of HellIs death the muse of Heaven I don’t knowO muse of where howcan I hope to goTo where I pray I’ll go sing at least tellShane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.” Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae’s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.

Shane McCrae, “peer to the peerless” (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.Of death the muse is death the muse of HellIs death the muse of Heaven I don’t knowO muse of where howcan I hope to goTo where I pray I’ll go sing at least tellShane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.” Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae’s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.

The never-before-published poems of one of the greatest American poets, John Berryman. John Berryman’s Dream Songs are arguably the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of being at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. The collected Dream Songs consists of 385 discrete poems, combining those from 77 Dream Songs, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and those from His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. But for Berryman, Henry lived on. Over the years, the poet wrote more than a hundred additional songs that didn’t make it into the various published editions of the songs. As elucidated by Shane McCrae in the introduction to this edition, Berryman hoped that readers might slot these unpublished poems in among the rest. Only Sing, which includes both finished poems and drafts, isn’t merely the scraps left on a cutting room floor; it is a continuation of the epic cycle, an additional set of poems that crack language open, an extension of Berryman’s brilliant account of madness shot through with searing insight.

The never-before-published poems of one of the greatest American poets, John Berryman. John Berryman's Dream Songs are arguably the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of being at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. The collected Dream Songs consists of 385 discrete poems, combining those from 77 Dream Songs, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and those from His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. But for Berryman, Henry lived on. Over the years, the poet wrote more than a hundred additional songs that didn't make it into the various published editions of the songs. As elucidated by Shane McCrae in the introduction to this edition, Berryman hoped that readers might slot these unpublished poems in among the rest. Only Sing, which includes both finished poems and drafts, isn't merely the scraps left on a cutting room floor; it is a continuation of the epic cycle, an additional set of poems that crack language open, an extension of Berryman's brilliant account of madness shot through with searing insight.

A profound exploration of race, history, and the afterlife from an acclaimed poetIn Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae continues to be "a shrewd composer of American stories" (The New Yorker). 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 and his own identity.McCrae''s verses span religious, historical, and political themes, searching for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness. Sometimes I Never Suffered imagines eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and the culmination of time''s manifold potential to mend.I think now more than halfOf life is death but I can''t dieEnough for all the life I seeA thought-provoking exploration of race, discrimination, and the complexities of the African American experience, this award-winning collection solidifies McCrae''s place among the most compelling voices in contemporary poetry.

This program is read by the author.An incisive new collection of poetry on political and contemporary themesI’m made of murderers I’m madeOf nobodies and immigrants and the poorand a whole / Family the mother’sliver and her lungsIn The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the audiobook’s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy in this country, The Gilded Auction Block is an audiobook about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T S ELIOT PRIZE 2020''Out of personal history, out of the history of an enduringly fractured nation, and out of the deep history of language, Shane McCrae is writing the most urgent, electric poems of his generation'' Garth Greenwell''Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis'' Rabih AlameddineI think now more than halfOf life is death but I can''t dieEnough for all the life I seeIn Sometimes I Never Suffered, Shane McCrae remains ''a shrewd composer of American stories (Dan Chiasson, 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, as well as his own, racial history.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.

''Beautifully up-to-date, old-fashioned work, where the dignity of English meters meets, as in a mosh pit, the vitality - and often the brutality - of American speech'' Dan Chiasson, New Yorker''Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis'' Rabih AlameddineI''m made of murderers I''m madeOf nobodies and immigrants and the poorand a whole / Family the mother''sliver and her lungsIn The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book''s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.

''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, GuardianWriting 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.''

A TELEGRAPH BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023''One of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time'' GuardianShane McCrae, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry, returns with The Many Hundreds of the Scent, an urgent new collection that brims with lyric force. He expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career; in addition to introducing his readers to ''the thin king / who eats the world,'' McCrae invites them to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. In brutal, sorrowful lines, he recounts being kidnapped by his white supremacist maternal grandparents from his Black father as a boy. ''O reader, listener, stay,'' McCrae writes. ''You are now evidence.''In The Many Hundreds of the Scent, Homeric figures mingle with those that populate the poet''s world. Helen weighs Paris''s spear in her hand and bloodies a raging Achilles; Penelope burns her loom each night; Dido watches Aeneas''s ship burn on the horizon. A strikingly original and engaging poet, McCrae continually surprises - the collection includes a series of poems about the advent of post-rock and Hex, the debut album of the band Bark Psychosis. With this collection, he has once more crafted an extraordinarily affecting book of poetry. As Kate Kellaway writes in the Guardian, ''In McCrae''s hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through.''

Award winning poet of our times Shane McCrae, ''peer to the peerless'' (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.Of death the muse is death the muse of HellIs death the muse of Heaven I don''t knowO muse of where howcan I hope to goTo where I pray I''ll go sing at least tellShane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, ''McCrae''s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.'' Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae''s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.

A stunning new collection of poetry from Shane McCrae, winner of the Whiting Writers'' Award.Shane McCrae, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry, returns with The Many Hundreds of the Scent, an urgent new collection that brims with lyric force. He expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career. In addition to introducing his readers to “the thin king / who eats the world,” McCrae invites them to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. In brutal, sorrowful lines, he recounts being kidnapped by his white supremacist maternal grandparents from his Black father as a boy. “O reader, listener, stay,” McCrae writes. “You are now evidence.”In The Many Hundreds of the Scent, Homeric figures mingle with those who populate the poet’s world. Helen weighs Paris’s spear in her hand and bloodies a raging Achilles; Penelope burns her loom each night; Dido watches Aeneas’s ship burn on the horizon. A strikingly original and engaging poet, McCrae continually surprises—the collection includes a series of poems about the advent of post-rock and Hex, the debut album of the English band Bark Psychosis. With this collection, he has once more crafted an extraordinarily affecting book of poetry. As Kate Kellaway writes in The Guardian, “In McCrae’s hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through.”

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 takeI know I should feel wounded by your deathI write to you to make a wound write backShane 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.”

A stunning new collection of poetry from Shane McCrae, winner of the Whiting Writers' Award.Shane McCrae, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry, returns with The Many Hundreds of the Scent, an urgent new collection that brims with lyric force. He expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career. In addition to introducing his readers to “the thin king / who eats the world,” McCrae invites them to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. In brutal, sorrowful lines, he recounts being kidnapped by his white supremacist maternal grandparents from his Black father as a boy. “O reader, listener, stay,” McCrae writes. “You are now evidence.”In The Many Hundreds of the Scent, Homeric figures mingle with those who populate the poet’s world. Helen weighs Paris’s spear in her hand and bloodies a raging Achilles; Penelope burns her loom each night; Dido watches Aeneas’s ship burn on the horizon. A strikingly original and engaging poet, McCrae continually surprises—the collection includes a series of poems about the advent of post-rock and Hex, the debut album of the English band Bark Psychosis. With this collection, he has once more crafted an extraordinarily affecting book of poetry. As Kate Kellaway writes in The Guardian, “In McCrae’s hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through.”

Shane McCrae, “peer to the peerless” (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.Of death the muse is death the muse of HellIs death the muse of Heaven I don’t knowO muse of where howcan I hope to goTo where I pray I’ll go sing at least tellShane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.” Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae’s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.

Shane McCrae, “peer to the peerless” (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.Of death the muse is death the muse of HellIs death the muse of Heaven I don’t knowO muse of where howcan I hope to goTo where I pray I’ll go sing at least tellShane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.” Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae’s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.

The never-before-published poems of one of the greatest American poets, John Berryman. John Berryman’s Dream Songs are arguably the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of being at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. The collected Dream Songs consists of 385 discrete poems, combining those from 77 Dream Songs, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and those from His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. But for Berryman, Henry lived on. Over the years, the poet wrote more than a hundred additional songs that didn’t make it into the various published editions of the songs. As elucidated by Shane McCrae in the introduction to this edition, Berryman hoped that readers might slot these unpublished poems in among the rest. Only Sing, which includes both finished poems and drafts, isn’t merely the scraps left on a cutting room floor; it is a continuation of the epic cycle, an additional set of poems that crack language open, an extension of Berryman’s brilliant account of madness shot through with searing insight.

The never-before-published poems of one of the greatest American poets, John Berryman. John Berryman's Dream Songs are arguably the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of poems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of being at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. The collected Dream Songs consists of 385 discrete poems, combining those from 77 Dream Songs, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and those from His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969. But for Berryman, Henry lived on. Over the years, the poet wrote more than a hundred additional songs that didn't make it into the various published editions of the songs. As elucidated by Shane McCrae in the introduction to this edition, Berryman hoped that readers might slot these unpublished poems in among the rest. Only Sing, which includes both finished poems and drafts, isn't merely the scraps left on a cutting room floor; it is a continuation of the epic cycle, an additional set of poems that crack language open, an extension of Berryman's brilliant account of madness shot through with searing insight.

A profound exploration of race, history, and the afterlife from an acclaimed poetIn Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae continues to be "a shrewd composer of American stories" (The New Yorker). 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 and his own identity.McCrae''s verses span religious, historical, and political themes, searching for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness. Sometimes I Never Suffered imagines eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and the culmination of time''s manifold potential to mend.I think now more than halfOf life is death but I can''t dieEnough for all the life I seeA thought-provoking exploration of race, discrimination, and the complexities of the African American experience, this award-winning collection solidifies McCrae''s place among the most compelling voices in contemporary poetry.

This program is read by the author.An incisive new collection of poetry on political and contemporary themesI’m made of murderers I’m madeOf nobodies and immigrants and the poorand a whole / Family the mother’sliver and her lungsIn The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the audiobook’s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy in this country, The Gilded Auction Block is an audiobook about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE T S ELIOT PRIZE 2020''Out of personal history, out of the history of an enduringly fractured nation, and out of the deep history of language, Shane McCrae is writing the most urgent, electric poems of his generation'' Garth Greenwell''Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis'' Rabih AlameddineI think now more than halfOf life is death but I can''t dieEnough for all the life I seeIn Sometimes I Never Suffered, Shane McCrae remains ''a shrewd composer of American stories (Dan Chiasson, 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, as well as his own, racial history.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.

''Beautifully up-to-date, old-fashioned work, where the dignity of English meters meets, as in a mosh pit, the vitality - and often the brutality - of American speech'' Dan Chiasson, New Yorker''Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis'' Rabih AlameddineI''m made of murderers I''m madeOf nobodies and immigrants and the poorand a whole / Family the mother''sliver and her lungsIn The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book''s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.

''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, GuardianWriting 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.''

A TELEGRAPH BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023''One of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time'' GuardianShane McCrae, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary poetry, returns with The Many Hundreds of the Scent, an urgent new collection that brims with lyric force. He expands both the poetic and the personal mythologies that he has been constructing over the course of his career; in addition to introducing his readers to ''the thin king / who eats the world,'' McCrae invites them to bear witness to his tangle of childhood memories. In brutal, sorrowful lines, he recounts being kidnapped by his white supremacist maternal grandparents from his Black father as a boy. ''O reader, listener, stay,'' McCrae writes. ''You are now evidence.''In The Many Hundreds of the Scent, Homeric figures mingle with those that populate the poet''s world. Helen weighs Paris''s spear in her hand and bloodies a raging Achilles; Penelope burns her loom each night; Dido watches Aeneas''s ship burn on the horizon. A strikingly original and engaging poet, McCrae continually surprises - the collection includes a series of poems about the advent of post-rock and Hex, the debut album of the band Bark Psychosis. With this collection, he has once more crafted an extraordinarily affecting book of poetry. As Kate Kellaway writes in the Guardian, ''In McCrae''s hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through.''

Award winning poet of our times Shane McCrae, ''peer to the peerless'' (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.Of death the muse is death the muse of HellIs death the muse of Heaven I don''t knowO muse of where howcan I hope to goTo where I pray I''ll go sing at least tellShane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, ''McCrae''s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.'' Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae''s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.