10th anniversary edition of Shane McCrae’s groundbreaking first collection of poetry, Mule, first published in 2011. With new poems by the author and an introduction by Victoria Chang.
“'Imagine // welcoming the wound,' McCrae writes in his frontispiece poem, 'The Cardinal Is The Marriage Bird.' McCrae not only acquiesces to the wound in Mule, but he revises the wound through language, and in the process, we are in the midst of beauty. I hope that a new generation of readers, through this tenth anniversary edition, will be able to experience the skillful contradictions within McCrae’s language, and be opened up and broken in the same way that I was when I first read this stunning and singular book.” - Victoria Chang
“[Mule] is a book both haunted and haunting—possessed by sound and its tremendous momentum, that somehow-suspended momentum, hypnotic in its rhythms and compelling in its headlong fall into the truth of the heart.” - Cole Swensen
“While Mule is prosodically rich, it also explores personal history, race, and religion at length, as well as giving new versions of confessional and devotional poetry.” - Lindsay Turner, Kenyon Review
Shane McCrae’s most recent books are Sometimes I Never Suffered, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and The Gilded Auction Block, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has received a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
