Sometimes I Never Suffered
Poems
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ISBN10: 0374602913
ISBN13: 9780374602918
Trade Paperback
112 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.00
Finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Award
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 remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). 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.
Reviews
Praise for Sometimes I Never Suffered
"In McCrae’s hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through."—Kate Kellaway, The Guardian
“Shane McCrae has many gifts as a poet, but among his most hypnotizing is his ability to create poems that simultaneously blare and beacon . . . McCrae has been creating ambitious work that demands—earns—our attention. I often feel out of time when I am reading his words; they arrive with a Miltonic fury, and yet they are so contemporary and critical for our present, strange world.”—Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
"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 America, making it an essential contribution to contemporary poetry."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About the author
Shane McCrae
