The Gilded Auction Block
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An incisive new collection of poetry on political and contemporary themes
I’m made of murderers I’m made
Of nobodies and immigrants and the poor
and a whole / Family the mother’s
liver and her lungs
In The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book’s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans. A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy in this country, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McCrae, a National Book Award finalist for In the Language of My Captor, exposes how, for marginalized peoples, the America that exists in the white imagination is not the one that exists in reality. This sprawling yet astute collection revisits the brutal history that enabled the election of Trump, since for McCrae, Trump is not the cause of America's racism but a hazardous symptom of deep-rooted white fear. In "Everything I Know About Blackness I Learned From Donald Trump," McCrae equates himself to "A slave on the run from you an Egyptian queen/ And even in my dreams I'm in your dreams." McCrae is at pains to show how, in Trump's America, the mere fact of blackness is often a threat to whiteness. Similarly, in "The Brown Horse Ariel," the horse in Sylvia Plath's poem "Ariel" represents the toxic, complementary relationship between white and black Americas. McCrae equates blackness to "the fear of death," writing, "Who could not know himself until he knew his rider." The fourth and final section emphasizes those historical Americans who largely remain nameless despite making the nation what it is, the "murderers" as well as the "nobodies and immigrants and the poor." In McCrae's timely observations, the American Dream is an illusion that silences its victims.
