A moving, slippery and imagistic prose memoir by one of my favourite lyric poets writing today -- RAYMOND ANTROBUS
Shane McCrae's powerful, indelible poet's voice has now extended to the memoir, and how fortunate are we that the very things that distinguish his verse - truth-telling, sharp observation, more than a sense of the moment, profundity worn lightly - grace his harrowing and enlightening tale about race and what makes an American family and why. An essential story for our times -- HILTON ALS
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is the kind of story that pulls you right in with its voice, the kind of book that sways you with heart-wrenching honesty and beautiful music. There is something magnetic to this storytelling, which gives us an incantation of memory that is as moving as it is spellbinding. For what tears up the family in this book is what tears up this country still, prevents it from finding itself. McCrae's voice is vulnerable and direct and precise, the voice of a poet who teaches us again what musical prose can do. This is such a compelling and necessary book -- ILYA KAMINSKY
Shane McCrae's extraordinary memoir is a kinaesthetic feat in the art of remembering, a complex layering of, and a laying bare of, the trauma of a stolen Black identity. Each meticulous, mellifluous, sentence charts a journey with multiple detours, dead ends and unexpected destinations. It is befitting that catharsis comes through language itself, the language of poetry. Ambitious and profound, this book will leave an indelible imprint on the mind of the reader -- PATIENCE AGBABI
A precise articulation of memory, its making and unmaking, McCrae's book is a vivid, churning and compulsive account of one man's personal reckoning with race, prejudice and the ideologies that haunt modern America. Written with a sharp and constantly-searching language,
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is as acute in its thinking as it is brave in its emotional charge -- SEAN HEWITT
A fantastic book, if harrowing. A story only reality could dream up -- JARRED MCGINNIS
A book by a man who was kidnapped as a child, and raised by his kidnappers, and no further attempt to describe what's in these pages can prepare the reader for the hardness of the story nor the dazzling light of McCrae's prose -- JOHN DARNIELLE
An exceptional memoir . . . Readers will walk away with a stronger sense of awe . . . , both for his resilience and his command of language. This gorgeous meditation on family, race, and identity isn't easy to shake * * Publishers Weekly * *
Praise for Sometimes I Never Suffered:
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 risque; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis -- RABIH ALAMEDDINE
