His poetry moves freely within the restricted syllabic lines, constructing a wild, vivid dreamworld. As in Beckett and Whitman, repetition generates a self-searching, hypnotic music. This dazzling collection tests the limits of language, memory, and mythmaking in wildly inventive, often devastating ways." - Publishers Weekly, "McCrae's poems possess a self-reflective quality without being burdened by history. 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." -David Woo, Poetry "Prophetic and necessary. Praise is due for their craft, but even more so for their imaginative power." -Michael Autrey, Booklist "McCrae's poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time. confirms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time, throwing punches at the English language and its hierarchical traditions." -Kit Fan, The Guardian (UK) "What observes at the end of 'Worldful,' 'but what life does / Not have to be reduced to be imagined,' is true of any description or summary of the best of these lyrics.
"McCrae's poems possess a self-reflective quality without being burdened by history. As he writes, "God first thought time itself / Was flawed but time was God's first mirror." 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. 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. 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 ). 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.
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