Review by Booklist Review
National Book Award finalist McCrae confronts the current American president and does not shy away from naming names. McCrae invokes present indignities shared by disenfranchised peoples using noticeably large gaps between words that call attention to a broken system while also offering space for grievances to be heard. The poem Guns Will Be Guns manipulates Trump's errant speech patterns, ironically giving a victim's voice to a gun and warning those brave enough to speak out against its intentional violence: boy watch out the guns / Themselves will start / Killing. McCrae's four-part collection includes a surreal dreamscape that turns into a nightmare. In this multisectioned long poem, a creature that is half bird and half man chastises humankind for ushering in hell while mimicking Trumpisms in italicized text. McCrae's poems are ghoulish and grim, yet they do inspire awe and a bit of hope that in these torrential times, the dark dreams of a poet might help stir up change in the body politic.--Michael Ruzicka Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McCrae, a National Book Award finalist for In the Language of My Captor, exposes how, for marginalized peoples, the America that exists in the white imagination is not the one that exists in reality. This sprawling yet astute collection revisits the brutal history that enabled the election of Trump, since for McCrae, Trump is not the cause of America's racism but a hazardous symptom of deep-rooted white fear. In "Everything I Know About Blackness I Learned From Donald Trump," McCrae equates himself to "A slave on the run from you an Egyptian queen/ And even in my dreams I'm in your dreams." McCrae is at pains to show how, in Trump's America, the mere fact of blackness is often a threat to whiteness. Similarly, in "The Brown Horse Ariel," the horse in Sylvia Plath's poem "Ariel" represents the toxic, complementary relationship between white and black Americas. McCrae equates blackness to "the fear of death," writing, "Who could not know himself until he knew his rider." The fourth and final section emphasizes those historical Americans who largely remain nameless despite making the nation what it is, the "murderers" as well as the "nobodies and immigrants and the poor." In McCrae's timely observations, the American Dream is an illusion that silences its victims. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, McCrae (In the language of my captors) again tackles many heated current sociopolitical issues, embarking on the daring task of writing a poetry of engagement without turning into a sentimental propagandist. Using precise and direct language, he articulates a response to these issues and suggests a new sensibility defining our shared humanity. Yet as he engages critically with reality, bitterness and sarcasm lurk in most of the poems: "my tears met yours in the ditch/ America they carry me downstream." The core theme here is human pathos in times of ethical anxiety, as McCrae forthrightly explores discrimination, political corruption, justice, falsification of language, and the distortion of truth by the powerful. Poetry and politics go hand in hand to frame a dialog and to highlight the role of the poet as a witness to his time and place with a profound testimonial power. Verdict -McCrae writes about his public concerns in poetically sharp and -moving poems devoid of -cliché and polemics. Recommended for all poetry -readers.-Sadiq Alkoriji, Broward Cty. Lib. Syst., FL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
