Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, a new collection from the award-winning poet
I think now more than half Of life is death but I can't die Enough for all the life I see
In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae. 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 racial history, as well as his own.
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.
"In McCrae's hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through."
Kate Kellaway, The Guardian
"Racial injustice, economic inequality, simple human cruelty"
McCrae addresses all of these subjects, these facts of the world, head-on
"The stunning fifth book from McCrae (The Gilded Auction Block) is steeped in the truths of witness and imagination . . . These poems see the white world as it chooses not to be seen, and illuminate the contradictions, disappointments, and loneliness that comes with paying true witness . . . This newest collection continues McCrae's powerful examination into race, forgiveness, and meaning in Ameri
