“What is remembering if not giving each bloody knife a body?”, writes American poet and Guggenheim fellow Shane McCrae. This is one of many powerfully visceral ruminations on memory in his new book billed as a “memoir of a kidnapping”. But this is not a memoir in the traditional sense. It’s more a transcript of recounting memories, sitting somewhere between diary and epic poem.
McCrae was kidnapped from his Black father, aged three, by his maternal white supremacist grandparents, who in their youth, he says, looked like Elizabeth Taylor and George Clooney. They lied to him and physically abused him, and it’s this, not necessarily the motivations behind the kidnapping, that McCrae unravels poetically.
