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Summary
Summary
Finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017)
Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.
Author Notes
SHANE MCCRAE is the author of four other books of poetry, including The Animal Too Big to Kill, Mule, Forgiveness Forgiveness , and Blood .
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McCrae (The Animal Too Big to Kill) continues his confrontations with American racism in his superb, if occasionally long-winded, fifth collection. He splits the text into four sections of lyric poems, with the second featuring a prose "memoir" series. Within the memoir persona, McCrae intersperses poems that use Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his adopted mixed-race son, Jim Limber, to explore the complications of losing one's own racial identity within a family dynamic: "My Daddy's white so I don't get his face." Much of McCrae's work here wrangles with being trapped in a history where one is treated inhumanely and with constant suspicion, with those feelings reflected-or projected-back on those responsible for that treatment. "Whether you're here/ to see me or to see the monkeys// You're here to see yourselves," he writes. As McCrae makes clear, having to constantly negotiate the boundaries of one's otherness leads to an internal tug of war: "Listen I do a thing to piss a white man off// I'm bound to that man's will hell/ I'm bound to that man's pleasure/ He got me on a level where he doesn't even have to think/ And all I do is think about him." With a raw honesty, McCrae refuses to shy away from the effects of oppression and faces up to those not willing to acknowledge their part in a history many want to forget. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
E McCrae, on the other hand, makes dangerous points, This book, his fifth, comprises four sequences in four characters' voices, each complicit in his own humiliating story. One seems trapped in a zoo, or a racist display like those in 19th-century exhibitions: "The keeper's language has infected me." Another, perhaps the poet himself, remembers, in prose, the hateful white grandfather who raised him in a dead world of childhood trauma, "the whole world of wrecked, and burned, and abandoned things, each trapped in the moment of its destruction." A third overhears the (made-up) actor Banjo Yes, a black actor from the early days of Hollywood who recalls the compromises he made. The standout poems, though, follow "Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis," a real person sometimes invoked by Confederate sympathizers to paint Davis as not all that racist. McCrae, of course, will have none of it: "it was daddy Jeff," McCrae's faux-naif Jim explains, "Who kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes / Until they fit as tight as bandages." McCrae can pivot - almost as Frank Bidart pivots - from plot into aphorism and emblem: "The wheel of history turns in the gut / of the white man but the Negro is strapped / to the wheel." His language remains as stark as the perdurable, terrible history it contains - a history that is not over yet.
Library Journal Review
In his award-winning The Animal Too Big To Kill, McCrae explored the conundrum of being a half-black man raised by white supremacists, and his new work again confronts the crosscurrents of race and history. Whether he's presenting a black man exhibited behind bars who's wiser than the desperate white zookeeper, a mulatto boy adopted by Jefferson Davis, or acclaimed performer Banjo Yes, who reflects angrily on how white culture shaped his life and career, McCrae delivers sharp scenarios and cool, forthright language. The core concern is freedom: says Banjo, "you think it's/ making decisions other folks won't like/ Listen I do a thing to piss a white man off// I'm bound to that man's will." VERDICT Unsettling and approachable for a wide audience. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
1 His God | p. 3 |
Panopticon | p. 5 |
Privacy | p. 6 |
What Do You Know About Shame | p. 8 |
Privacy 2 | p. 11 |
In the Language | p. 13 |
2 Purgatory: A Memoir / A Son and a Father of Sons | p. 17 |
3 Banjo Yes Receives a Lifetime Achievement Award | p. 55 |
Banjo Yes Recalls His First Movies | p. 58 |
Banjo Yes Talks About His First White Wife | p. 60 |
Banjo Yes Plucks an Apple from a Tree in a Park | p. 61 |
Banjo Yes Talks About Motivation | p. 63 |
Banjo Yes Asks a journalist | p. 65 |
4 (hope)(lessness) | p. 69 |
Sunlight | p. 72 |
Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Visits His Adoptive Parents After the War | p. 77 |
Asked About The Banjo Man and Its Sequels Banjo Yes Tells a Journalist Something About Himself | p. 78 |
Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man's Face | p. 82 |
Acknowledgments | p. 85 |