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.

Author City: IOWA CITY, IA USA

Shane McCrae is the author of MULE (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and the chapbooks One Neither One (Octopus Books) and IN CANAAN (Rescue Press). His work has appeared in African American Review, Agni, The American Poetry Review, DENVER QUARTERLY, Effing Magazine, Typo and The Best American Poetry 2010. He holds degrees from Linfield College, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Harvard Law School, and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Iowa. He is married, and has three children.

Reviews and Other Links
Weston Cutter @ Corduroy Books
interview by Chris Schacht @ Puerto del Bloga