by Shane McCrae (Author)
In Shane McCrae's NONFICTION, the self is repeatedly re-figured as the site of rupture between truth and fiction, present and past, first-person and third-person-the rupture in which the dichotomies we live by, the dichotomies that erase us, originate. The speakers of these poems inhabit impossible situations, and the poems themselves speak neither of overcoming, nor of being overcome by, these impossibilities, but of the moment of equilibrium between extremes, the moment of uncertainty from which the future emerges. As McCrae writes at the end of his two-part poem on Solomon Northup, "in the darkness / I after a while couldn't be sure / My eyes were open." These poems assert, and foreground, possibility; the rupture they describe is hope.
Author Biography
Shane McCrae is the author of "Mule" (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and "Blood" (Noemi Press, 2013), as well as three chapbooks--most recently, Nonfiction, which won the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition. He holds degrees from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and Harvard Law School, and has received a Whiting Writer's Award and a fellowship from the NEA.