In the Language of My Captor - Softcover

McCrae, Shane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081957712X ISBN 13: 9780819577122

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.

About this title

Review:

"His language remains as stark as the perdurable, terrible history it contains -- a history that is not over yet."--Stephanie Burt, New York Times Book Review
"[A]n astonishingly precise account of a complex emotional past.."--Ryo Yamaguchi, Boston Review
"McCrae continues his confrontations with American racism in his superb fifth collection. With a raw honesty, McCrae refuses to shy away from the effects of oppression and faces up to those not willing to acknowledge their part in a history many want to forget."--Publishers Weekly
"[In the Language of My Captor] impl[ies] an audience other than the captor, someone who might hear his description of the captivity--spoken, it seems, in the language of his captivity--and understand."--Jonathan Farmer, Kenyon Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 081957712X
• ISBN 13: 9780819577122
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108