Blood

"Shane McCrae's astounding third collection of poems, Blood, is a book of dramatic slave narratives that are written so close to the bone that every poem reads like an insider's account of what happened inside the burning frame of a history nobody read. This is a treatise about slavery in every conveyance of the word: slavery to the man, to the Klan, to the child, to the land, to a murderous heart, to bad thinking, to the betrayed and to the betrayer. And every poem seems to be written from the place of some final recognition, a reckoning: This is who I am. This is what happened to me. This is what happened to us, as a people." -- Review by Michael Klein, publisher's website.