THE GILDED AUCTION BLOCK - SHANE MCCRAE

Another poetry book. I grabbed this one because I heard about McCrae’s more recent collection that features poems about hell, which sounded intriguing. Honestly, I wish the library had that one, the best poem in this collection is the “hell poem” which takes up the majority of this small volume and is far and away the best thing in this book. It is quite literal, the poem is about being in hell and being shown around hell by a sort of robot bird Virgil. Very cool, far out stuff. The other sections of the book try to take on the current moment more directly. Many begin with a quote from Donald Trump. Many address “America” directly and remind me of Ginsberg. However, like Ginsberg, that makes much of these seem outdated already. I’m not really sure what we get by saying something like “if Joe Arpaio was black, he wouldn’t have gotten a pardon” which is what the poem “Black Joe Arpaio” is about. Who is that for? What does that mean to tell me about the US? I liked “Guns will be guns” specifically the lines, “Try to control them boy and watch out the guns / themselves will start / killing / America they’re very sensitive" The second section of the book revolves more around personal poems that explore his memories and childhood in which he deploys this really cool looping, meandering style that does feel like someone trying to explain their memories to you without having smoothed out what they want to say first. There’s lots of strange spacing between words that act as quasi-linebreaks and lend a unique style that seems like real remembering. I think this book doesn’t work for me when it’s trying to engage very specific, real world issues, I just don’t need poetry for that. It’s at its best when it’s at its strangest and most removed from the “real world” Hopefully I can get my hands on the more complete hell poem in the near future.