Cain Named the Animal

"Your English is dead yet it tugs away from you/ Like a strong dog fighting a leash," McCrae writes in his powerful eighth collection. For a collection that uses the word heaven often, rarely has salvation felt more tenuous. Building upon the biblical world that McCrae has fashioned across previous books, questions of life and death give rise to poems exploring the possibility of redemption, including a series in which a robot bird leads the speaker through hell, where the speaker's body is torn apart before being reassembled: "The coming back together was/ Agony greater than the flying/ Apart had been." There's something terrifyingly amiss but prophetic and necessary in McCrae's vision of the world, his spiraling syntax perfectly capturing contemporary peripatetic experiences in "Nowhere is Local": "I've never anywhere I've/ Lived before wanted to be buried where I've lived/ But have ignored live-/ long all my life the longest part of life." This dazzling collection tests the limits of language, memory, and mythmaking in wildly inventive, often devastating ways. (Apr.)