6 Powerful Poetry Collections from New Voices
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate Tracy K. Smith celebrates a transformational generation of new voices.
By Tracy K. Smith
In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae
In his immaculate latest, McCrae interweaves poems in the voice of Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, with a personal memoir of being adopted into the home of his white grandparents. In each case, the reader is led to ponder accounts of racism alongside nuanced and troubling instances of love. In two distinct sequences of persona poems, a black entertainer named Banjo Yes and an unnamed speaker who serves as a sideshow attraction see the world around them with a crystalline clarity that transcends their confines, transmitting a philosophy of race, fear, and privacy that calls the very terms of freedom and captivity into question: "I am / their honest mirror / I say Whether you're here / to see me or to see the monkeys / You're here to see yourselves."
Published 03/23/2018