“The robot bird flew down // From the ceiling     landed on / My head bent     its head down / And whispered in my ear / Wake up you     fucker.” A new installment in Shane McCrae’s thrilling, terrifying, madcap, and marvelous “The Hell Poem.”

“in the book as I remember it is surrounded by / parentheses / The illustrator / keeps him moving 



black / Parentheses like as if his brown skin struck / black / Sparks on the air with every step.” Shane McCrae’s recollection of a 1940s children’s book reanimates the terrible power of its depictions and their violent persistence in memory and beyond.

Writing to a half-brother he didn’t know, Shane McCrae tells a powerful story of longing across race, distance and lies–a story of “water in a fist” where the brothers are “not the fist/…not the water/we the thirst.”