Cain Named the Animal

A prophetic new collection of poems from Shane McCrae, "a shrewd composer of American stories" (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)Writing you I give the death I takeI know I should feel wounded by your deathI write to you to make a wound write backShane McCrae fashions a world of endings and infinites in Cain Named the Animal. With cyclical, rhythmic lines that create and re-create images of our shared and specific pasts, McCrae's work moves into and through the wounds that we remember and "strains toward a vision of joy" (Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books).Cain Named the Animal expands upon the biblical, heavenly world that McCrae has been building throughout his previous collections; he writes of Eden, of the lost tribe that watched time enter the garden and God rehearse the world, and of the cartoon torments of hell. Yet for McCrae, these outer bounds of our universe are inseparable from the lives and deaths on Earth, from the mundanities and miracles of time passing and people growing up, growing old, and growing apart. As he writes, "God first thought time itself / Was flawed but time was God's first mirror."

ContentsSome Heavens Are All Silence 3Love Poems and OthersArm in the Excavator's Shovel 7Whom I Have Blocked Out 9To Make a Wound 11A Letter to Lucie About Lucie 12Worldful 14To My Mother's Father 17The King of the Sadnesses of Dogs 18Eurydice on the Art of Poetry 20Husbands 22For Melissa Asleep Upstairs 23Nowhere Is Local 24The Professor 25The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake 26For Sylvia Twenty-Eight in July 27To Nicholas from My Absence 28Having Been Raised by My Kidnappers I Consider the Gift of Life, or A Gift from a Thief 29A Thousand Pictures 30Please Come Flying 32Vivian Maier Considers Heaven from a Bench in Rogers Beach Park Chicago 33RecapitulationsThe Hastily Assembled Angel on Embodiment 37Jim Limber on Silence 39Cain Named the AnimalThe Lost Tribe of Eden 43Constantly Throwing Up 44The Lost Tribe of Eden at the Beginning of the Days of Blood 47The Robot Bird Tells Me How It Is I Am in Hell 49The Beginning of Time 53The Reformation 56In Which the Beginning of Time Happens in a Different Way 65The Dream at the End of the Dream 68Notes 81Acknowledgments 83