Shane McCrae
Photo courtesy of Shane McCrae
Bio
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 work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and he has received a Whiting Writer's Award and a fellowship from the NEA.
Author's Statement
Had I not been fortunate enough to receive an NEA Fellowship this year, I don't know how I would have managed to push money worries from me and away to a tolerable distance. The fellowship has made--and continues to make--my work possible. And it's through my work that I make sense, as best I can, of and with my position in the world. But it's more important to me that my poems have some usefulness for any readers they might have, and I'm most grateful for the opportunity the fellowship affords me to keep trying to make something that might be beneficial to others.
The Crowd Shouted and Hollered
Cut off before
burning him his
Fingers his fingers off wanted his fingers
Fresh and could sell them
Later in town
and didn't want his fingers burned
black / Cut off his fingers held his fingers high
Mostly a clear day and
the crowd shouted and hollered and
They couldn't see the fingers there was so much blood could
only see the blood could see
The fingers there was so much blood / They couldn't tell the fingers from
the white man's fingers / It
looked as if the white man had
cut his own fingers off
But who what sane man
would cut his own fingers off
(from Blood, Noeni Press, 2013)