The New Yorker Reviews Shane McCrae's The Gilded Auction Block

Shane McCrae's new book, The Gilded Auction Block (FSG, 2019), is reviewed by Dan Chiasson for The New Yorker. "What makes McCrae’s compositions so ingenious are their marvels of prosody and form, learned from the English Renaissance poems that he read in libraries when he was just starting out. The result is 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," writes Chiasson. More:

...McCrae’s poems often read like transcripts, their style a flustered but necessary shorthand. He almost never uses conventional punctuation; instead, over the years, he has honed a signature repertoire of devices. Sometimes he pitches language headlong over his line breaks, only to halt it, in the next line, by oddly scattered caesuras and slashes. Because his style is so distinctive, he’s a presence even when he’s not the principal subject: the voices in his poems are hammered into his style. In “After Carrie Kinsey’s Letter to Theodore Roosevelt,” McCrae transforms into verse an important archival document—a letter to the President from an African-American woman whose brother had been taken into slavery by “a white man named MacRee” around 1903:

he has
No mother and no father Mr. President they are
both dead / I am his only friend
My brother have not done
Nothing for them to have him in
Chains and I saw no money

The letter is available online, a solid block of mostly unpunctuated prose... 

Read the full review at The New Yorker.