Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae Poems

Shane McCrae Biography

Shane McCrae (born September 22, 1975) is an American poet. He is the author of the poetry collections The Animal Too Big to Kill (winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor's Choice Award; to be published in September, 2015 by Persea Books), Forgiveness Forgiveness (Factory Hollow Press, 2014), Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), and Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011). McCrae was the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers' Award, and in 2012 his collection Mule was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. In 2013, McCrae received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2010, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Fence, and AGNI. Shane McCrae attended the University of Oregon, Linfield College, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Harvard Law School. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing program at Oberlin College. McCrae also teaches in the brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University.)

The Best Poem Of Shane McCrae

Whose Story of Us We Is Told Is Us

Brother is we is each of us we ghosts
Brother of white folks we
don't never known us brother we
Because we never doesn't fits
Nowhere we brother
doesn't fits in bodies

Our bodies we is always walking leaking
like a ghost can't be a body in one place
But every eyes / Catches and pulls at it
Like every eyes in any
white folks is another
Hole in our bodies

Brother / Is we is never known them close
Up close whose ghosts we brother leaking is
Whose story of us we is told is us is water in a fist
Brother we not the fist
we not the water
we the thirst

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