Shane McCrae’s In Canaan: A Poetic Exploration of Identity and Belonging

Description

In Canaan by Shane McCrae (Rescue Press, paperback)

Publication Date: March 10, 2011

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. African American Studies. In Shane McCrae’s IN CANAAN, he inhabits the personae of the escaped slave Margaret Garner, who, in the mid-1800s, murdered one of her daughters in order to keep her from returning to slavery. “I couldn’t stop/Hurting her because it hurt,” writes McCrae in the voice of Garner, “Before that night   I never had the chance to love   / Anyone/ she was the first   person I loved.” McCrae composes in broken forms and shattered fragments, retelling a harrowing historical story through the imagined first-person point of view of its tortured and terrified heroine.

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