Nonfiction

<p><span style=color: rgba(59 49 49 1)>In Shane McCrae's NONFICTION the self is repeatedly re-figured as the site of rupture between truth and fiction present and past first-person and third-person-the rupture in which the dichotomies we live by the dichotomies that erase us originate. The speakers of these poems inhabit impossible situations and the poems themselves speak neither of overcoming nor of being overcome by these impossibilities but of the moment of equilibrium between extremes the moment of uncertainty from which the future emerges. As McCrae writes at the end of his two-part poem on Solomon Northup in the darkness / I after a while couldn't be sure / My eyes were open. These poems assert and foreground possibility; the rupture they describe is hope.</span></p>