Cain Named the Animal

A prophetic new collection of poems from Shane McCrae, "a shrewd composer of American stories" (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)

Writing you I give the death I take
I know I should feel wounded by your death
I write to you to make a wound write back

Shane McCrae fashions a world of endings and infinites in Cain Named the Animal. With cyclical, rhythmic lines that create and re-create images of our shared and specific pasts, McCrae's work moves into and through the wounds that we remember and "strains toward a vision of joy" (Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books).

Cain Named the Animal expands upon the biblical, heavenly world that McCrae has been building throughout his previous collections; he writes of Eden, of the lost tribe that watched time enter the garden and God rehearse the world, and of the cartoon torments of hell. Yet for McCrae, these outer bounds of our universe are inseparable from the lives and deaths on Earth, from the mundanities and miracles of time passing and people growing up, growing old, and growing apart. As he writes, "God first thought time itself / Was flawed but time was God's first mirror."

Contents

Some Heavens Are All Silence 3

Love Poems and Others
Arm in the Excavator's Shovel 7
Whom I Have Blocked Out 9
To Make a Wound 11
A Letter to Lucie About Lucie 12
Worldful 14
To My Mother's Father 17
The King of the Sadnesses of Dogs 18
Eurydice on the Art of Poetry 20
Husbands 22
For Melissa Asleep Upstairs 23
Nowhere Is Local 24
The Professor 25
The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake 26
For Sylvia Twenty-Eight in July 27
To Nicholas from My Absence 28
Having Been Raised by My Kidnappers I Consider the Gift of Life, or A Gift from a Thief 29
A Thousand Pictures 30
Please Come Flying 32
Vivian Maier Considers Heaven from a Bench in Rogers Beach Park Chicago 33

Recapitulations
The Hastily Assembled Angel on Embodiment 37
Jim Limber on Silence 39

Cain Named the Animal
The Lost Tribe of Eden 43
Constantly Throwing Up 44
The Lost Tribe of Eden at the Beginning of the Days of Blood 47
The Robot Bird Tells Me How It Is I Am in Hell 49
The Beginning of Time 53
The Reformation 56
In Which the Beginning of Time Happens in a Different Way 65
The Dream at the End of the Dream 68

Notes 81
Acknowledgments 83