The Gilded Auction Block: Poems

by Shane McCrae

Overview

An incisive new collection of poetry on political and contemporary themes

I’m made of murderers I’m made
Of nobodies and immigrants and the poor

and a whole / Family the mother’s liver and her lungs

In The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book’s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy in this country, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374538712
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/18/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	648,196
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Shane McCrae is the author of five previous books of poetry: In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; The Animal Too Big to Kill, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky / Editor’s Choice Award; Forgiveness Forgiveness; Blood; and Mule. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

The President Visits the Storm

1
I Fight Him (Ann Parker)
Everything I Know About Blackness I Learned from Donald Trump
Black Joe Arpaio
Display Food
Sonnet for Desiree Fairooz Prosecuted for Laughing at Jeff Sessions’ Confirmation Hearing
We’ll Go No More a Roving
After Carrie Kinsey’s Letter to Theodore Roosevelt
Purchase
If You See Something, Say Something
The Role of the Negro in the Work of Art
The Brown Horse Ariel
After a Photograph of a Town House in the Lafayette Park Residential District Detroit
Awaiting the Guns
Guns Will Be Guns

2
Remembering My White Grandmother Who Loved Me and Hated Everybody Like Me
Forgiveness Grief
Hatred
Seawhere
Immigrants

3
The Hell Poem

4
The Monster Made of America Dreams of America
After the Skinny Repeal Is Voted Down

Notes
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

10/15/2018
McCrae, a National Book Award finalist for In the Language of My Captor, exposes how, for marginalized peoples, the America that exists in the white imagination is not the one that exists in reality. This sprawling yet astute collection revisits the brutal history that enabled the election of Trump, since for McCrae, Trump is not the cause of America’s racism but a hazardous symptom of deep-rooted white fear. In “Everything I Know About Blackness I Learned From Donald Trump,” McCrae equates himself to “A slave on the run from you an Egyptian queen/ And even in my dreams I’m in your dreams.” McCrae is at pains to show how, in Trump’s America, the mere fact of blackness is often a threat to whiteness. Similarly, in “The Brown Horse Ariel,” the horse in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Ariel” represents the toxic, complementary relationship between white and black Americas. McCrae equates blackness to “the fear of death,” writing, “Who could not know himself until he knew his rider.” The fourth and final section emphasizes those historical Americans who largely remain nameless despite making the nation what it is, the “murderers” as well as the “nobodies and immigrants and the poor.” In McCrae’s timely observations, the American Dream is an illusion that silences its victims. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Shane McCrae is a shrewd composer of American stories . . . He is a prospector for speech rhythms, collecting his material wherever he can. But American attics are full of old boxes of diaries and letters; and testimony, no matter how arresting, is not itself poetry. What makes McCrae’s compositions so ingenious are their marvels of prosody and form, learned from the English Renaissance poems that he read in libraries when he was just starting out. The result is beautifully up-to-date, old-fashioned work, where the dignity of English meters meets, as in a mosh pit, the vitality—and often the brutality—of American speech.” —Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

“Shane McCrae has many gifts as a poet, but among his most hypnotizing is his ability to create poems that simultaneously blare and beacon . . . McCrae has been creating ambitious work that demands—earns—our attention. I often feel out of time when I am reading his words; they arrive with a Miltonic fury, and yet they are so contemporary and critical for our present, strange world.” —Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

"This sprawling yet astute collection revisits the brutal history that enabled the election of Trump . . . In McCrae’s timely observations, the American Dream is an illusion that silences its victims." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher