Review by Booklist Review
The recipient of numerous distinguished awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, McCrae has divided his eighth collection, following The Gilded Auction Block (2019), into three sections. The last two contain several longer poems that are "continuations" or "alternate endings" of poems from earlier books. These doom-laden, prophetic narratives follow nightmare-logic; heaven and hell are envisioned; Blake, the Bible, and the Transformers and Terminator movie franchises are precursors. McCrae's lines, often unpunctuated, stutter, the rhythms stagger. In stark contrast, the tone of the lyrics in the first section is variable and personal, intimate and speculative. "Vivian Maier Considers Heaven from a Bench in Rogers Beach Park Chicago" does just what it says it's going to do, and wonderfully. "A Letter to Lucie About Lucie" fondly recalls and talks back to the poet Lucie Brock-Broido. What he observes at the end of "Worldful," "but what life does / Not have to be reduced to be imagined," is true of any description or summary of the best of these lyrics. Praise is due for their craft, but even more so for their imaginative power.
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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Your English is dead yet it tugs away from you/ Like a strong dog fighting a leash," McCrae writes in his powerful eighth collection. For a collection that uses the word heaven often, rarely has salvation felt more tenuous. Building upon the biblical world that McCrae has fashioned across previous books, questions of life and death give rise to poems exploring the possibility of redemption, including a series in which a robot bird leads the speaker through hell, where the speaker's body is torn apart before being reassembled: "The coming back together was/ Agony greater than the flying/ Apart had been." There's something terrifyingly amiss but prophetic and necessary in McCrae's vision of the world, his spiraling syntax perfectly capturing contemporary peripatetic experiences in "Nowhere is Local": "I've never anywhere I've/ Lived before wanted to be buried where I've lived/ But have ignored live-/ long all my life the longest part of life." This dazzling collection tests the limits of language, memory, and mythmaking in wildly inventive, often devastating ways. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
At its core, this seventh collection (after Sometimes I Never Suffered) from National Book Award winner McCrae is a sustained quest to reclaim lost portions of the traumatized self, both for the poet individually and for the collective persona of humanity. Life, he avers, may be a gift, but it comes with harsh qualifications: "A gift that disappears as it is given/ A gift from whom whenever they give you anything/ You have to ask them where they got it from/ A gift that disappears and takes you with it." As difficult to bear as loss, abuse, and need may be, they are irrevocable attributes of what we are: "You can't escape what you consume/ You must take part in the suffering that feeds you." In the title sequence that constitutes the volume's second half, McCrae reimagines the postlapsarian struggle of humankind to find its way back to divinity. Less immediate than his personal but thematically parallel poems, they nevertheless create a harrowing, phantasmagoric mythos. VERDICT Readers will marvel at McCrae's ability to achieve Miltonic scope with such economy of expression. His is an original voice well worth close reading.--Fred Muratori
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