Cain Named the Animal

In “To Make a Wound,” from Shane McCrae’s eighth collection, Cain Named the Animal, the poet addresses the grandmother who separated him from his African American father at an early age and reared him in a world of white supremacy:

We didn’t speak for years after I left
Writing you here I give the death I take
I know I should feel wounded by your death 
I write to you to make a wound write back 

The central wound of McCrae’s life, the cruel suppression of his own identity and the alienation that resulted, is made to “write back” and yield its meaning through the transformed perceptions of art, in poems addressed to those the poet loves, in retellings of the lives of lost figures from African American history, and in a mythopoeic vision divulged across several of his books. As he writes in the mythic piece “Constantly Throwing Up,”

   You can’t escape what you consume
You must take part in the suffering that feeds you 

In their searching, mingling measures, McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time. A profane, id-like “robot bird”—who barks expressions like “Hey fuckface”—acts as a judgmental psychopomp through McCrae’s vision of hell, looking, at one point, like the T-1000 Terminator. Such contemporary details lend authenticity to the epic form, grounding it in what Erich Auerbach, speaking of Dante, called “the truth as concrete reality.” 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. As he writes in “The Dream at the End of the Dream”:

Finally I glancing back I saw a
Black void had opened up behind me
That watching from the foot of the mountain
I long before had seen I saw
Me finally seeing it and saw
Me finally seeing […]