Cain Named the Animal: Poems

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."

Author: Shane McCrae
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 04/05/2022
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.25lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.50w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780374602857

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 03/01/2022 pg. 8
Publishers Weekly 04/18/2022
Library Journal 05/01/2022 pg. 92

About the Author
Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His most recent collection, Sometimes I Never Suffered, was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize. McCrae is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.