The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: The Gilded Auction Block: Poems, Shane McCrae

The Gilded Auction Block: Poems

Shane McCrae

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 4 reviews on

BookMarks logo

An incisive new collection of poetry on political and contemporary themes

I'm made of murderers I'm made
Of nobodies and immigrants and the poor

and a whole / Family the mother's
liver and her lungs

In The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book's four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy in this country, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Feb 18th, 2020
  • Pages: 112
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.50in - 0.30in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9780374538712
  • Categories: American - African American & Black

About the Author

McCrae, Shane: - 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, Sometimes I Never Suffered, which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and his recent collection, Cain Named the Animal. 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.

More books by Shane McCrae

Book Cover for: New and Collected Hell: A Poem, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: The Many Hundreds of the Scent: Poems, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: Cain Named the Animal: Poems, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: Sometimes I Never Suffered, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: Hex and Other Poems, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: In Canaan, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: Blood, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: In the Language of My Captor, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: The Animal Too Big to Kill: Poems, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: Mule: 10th Anniversary Edition, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: Nonfiction, Shane McCrae
Book Cover for: Two Appearances After the Resurrection, Shane McCrae

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"Shane McCrae is a shrewd composer of American stories . . . He is a prospector for speech rhythms, collecting his material wherever he can. But American attics are full of old boxes of diaries and letters; and testimony, no matter how arresting, is not itself poetry. 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." --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"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

This sprawling yet astute collection revisits the brutal history that enabled the election of Trump . . . In McCrae's timely observations, the American Dream is an illusion that silences its victims. --Publishers Weekly