Cain Named the Animal

by Shane McCrae

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, he writes 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.”

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

83 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2022

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most original visions of Hell I have ever encountered; fevered and hallucinatory - the images are sharp and very original. Found myself falling into the 'logic' between the lines; reminded me of Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire and The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien.

[Dessi Bocheva · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a big fan of how the different poems related to each other but I often struggled to understand some of the format/styles used. Not sure this was really for me.

[Febe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will be recommending this to a lot of you and by recommending I mean repeatedly smacking the book on the table in front of you will making feral-animal-like noises

I'd leave you quotes but you really have to find out yourself first<3

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

decided ten pages in this one needed te be read whilst sitting on the floor. I have yet to get up. I do not want to get up

[Elias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fav poems: Worldful, Please Come Flying, Jim Limber on Silence, The Lost Tribe of Eden, In Which the Beginning of Time....

[Taleen Sample · Rating 4 out of 5]

i think the first complete book of poetry i have read. a lot of it was mildly nonsensical (as i suppose poetry often is), with several religious allusions i have yet to unpack.

but i loved ‘the hastily assembled angel on embodiment’ (37-38):

“Built him so hurriedly he never had the
Chance to ask them questions not
Good questions not the questions anybody
Might as they watched their body built beneath them ask like ‘What

Is happening’ he thinks he might have asked
Like ‘Help’ he thinks he might have asked ‘Why am I
So high why can’t I kneel and make
With you whatever you’re making’ the hastily assembled”

to be built by other people — aren’t we all? all of us angels, using hammers and nails and glue guns and staples and paperclips to construct the characters and identities of the people around us. how to escape this? how to build ourselves? how to stop building others?

or is it a kindness, to tell people who they are, a sort of mercy.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In Heaven I expect the children are / A kind of furniture nobody sits on”

[Jake Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the very best things I have ever read.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“To whom have I been suffering / To whom will I be healed”. Shane McCrae’s Cain Named the Animal follows nicely in the vein of his previous poetry collections, such as Sometimes I Never Suffered, The Gilded Auction Block and In The Language of My Captor. Here a new world is deftly crafted from the old — from pasts both personal and public, from history and theology in tandem. McCrae is a favourite of mine for so many reasons, one of which is his willingness to make such declarations as “English is dead”, and his ability to write such vital poems as the show-stopping ‘Eurydice on the Art of Poetry’. In ‘To Nicholas from My Absence’ he writes, “When I was seventeen I couldn’t love / My father like his child / Whom I had been when I was three I am a blank where I should be”. The final, titular section of poems in this book forms a sequence that resembles the Old English vision poems, and contains so many standout poems in this collection, such as ‘The Lost Tribe of Eden at the Beginning of the Days of Blood’, ‘The Robot Bird Tells Me How It Is I Am in Hell’
(“Where else do humans start Cain named / The animal in Abel’s head”), ‘The Reformation’ (“coming back together was / Agony greater than the flying / Apart had been and coming back / Together the each part the pro- / cess of it raised me to my feet”, and the final poem, the fittingly titled ‘The Dream at the End of the Dream’, which ends: “Out of the lake into the world / Into the now dark sky the bird’s beak / Over my mouth we crossed the sky / Where I looked and saw the stars”.

[Pascale Petit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Original vision of hell, the lineation mirrors the terror, slippery as black ice, so we never know where the next step will take us. Impressive and indelible, a book I’ll keep rereading. Reminds me of my childhood reading of a cartoon old testament, where the child superimposes their take and life between the pictures and speech bubbles. Seems sadly prophetic too.

[S P · Rating 2 out of 5]

'We didn’t speak for years after I left
Writing you here 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'

(from 'To Make a Wound', p11)

[Reagan Kapasi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Enjoyed Reformation

[Trish Le · Rating 3 out of 5]

sonnet like quality to poems. some stand out ones. hozier is doing what these poems thought it was doing.

[Susan Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the poems where are to read but idk if that’s just my dyslexia getting in the way 😅 Overall, really enjoyed it and throughly enjoyed the use/twist of biblical ideas and figures in the book.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

We return to his heaven + hell poems, twinned with earthly ones. His voice, syntax, always a somber pleasure.

[Lara Corona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hello, first literary obsession of the year!

[Anna · Rating 1 out of 5]

~1.25

Formatting for the majority of the poems gave me a headache. None stood out to me.

[Davide · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime, elegant, heartfelt, virtuosic. All in all, dazzling.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Who knows enough about your life to
Give your life back to you
A picture says

your life has no beginning
A thousand pictures say your life
will end a thousand times"

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPL1t...