New and Collected Hell - by Shane McCrae (Paperback)

About the Book

"A pathbreaking work from a poet who "shows us how we need new music and new ears and eyes" (New York Journal of Books)-McCrae takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell"--

Book Synopsis

Shane McCrae, "peer to the peerless" (New York Journal of Books), takes up and turns on its head the mantle of Dante in this contemporary vision of Hell.

Of death the muse is death the muse of Hell
Is death the muse of Heaven I don't know
O muse of where howcan I hope to go
To where I pray I'll go sing at least tell

Shane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, "McCrae's poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . 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." Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae's work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.

Review Quotes

"McCrae approaches Dante's allegorical vision with an urgency derived from a struggle that collapses the personal and the social, until the metaphysical realm seems the only possible stage. . . . [He] exploits, in a way that few other modern poets have been able to, the power of allegory." --Elisa Gonzalez, The New Yorker

About the Author

Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award 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 The Many Hundreds of the Scent. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' 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.