The Many Hundreds of the Scent

Praise for Shane McCrae'Out of personal history, out of the history of an enduringly fractured nation and out of the deep history of language, Shane McCrae is writing the most urgent, electric poems of his generation'GARTH GREENWELL'Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risqué; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis'RABIH ALAMEDDINE 'McCrae's poems possess a self-reflective quality without being burdened by history . . . His poetry moves freely within the restricted syllabic lines, constructing a wild, vivid dreamworld of a lush green garden, where an angry robot bird leads us down an Edenic rabbit hole . . . It confrms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time, throwing punches at the English language and its hierarchical traditions'KIT FAN, Guardian 'A shrewd composer of American stories' 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