New and collected hell A poem

Shane McCrae, 1975-

Book - 2025

"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"--

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Subjects
Genres
poetry
Poetry
Poésie
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Shane McCrae, 1975- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
91 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780374615499
  • Invocation
  • The Hell Poem
  • The Hell Poem
  • The Hell Poem DLC
  • The Reformation
  • The Finger and the Ditch
  • Interlude: The Mind of Hell
  • Interlude: Law Converges on Itself
  • A Backward Well
  • A Revelation of a Further Darkness
  • No One Goes in Whole or Comes out Healed
  • I squeezed through
  • Law's Dream
  • The Dream at the End of the Dream
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Booklist Review

Poet (Cain Named the Animal, 2022) and memoirist (Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, 2023) McCrae has gathered his "hell" poems together in one volume. This is Dante's journey reconceived as if hell were the setting of an action movie. Instead of Virgil as his guide, the much-mutilated figure of the poet is guided by a robot bird voiced by an insult comic who has watched a lot of The Office. Hell isn't other people, it's a corporation. "Intake Interview" is the equivalent of the ninth circle of hell in an HR "bunker." McCrae devotes a great deal of attention to the mechanics of hell--elevators, jumbotrons, doors, mountains that sweat and move, inky dark spaces, and the most golden of golden lights. No matter the stanza forms, the majority of lines include gaps that create gaping caesuras. Among the expletives, the degradation, and the tortures that combine Rube Goldberg contraptions and Bugs Bunny physics, are gleaming lyric fragments, such as "Hell / Is sorrow's Heaven where it goes to live forever with // Its god the human body."

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.