Songs and Sonnets

<p><em>Songs and Sonnets</em> by Shane McCrae is a caustic formally agile sequence that confronts the psychic and political wreckage of contemporary America through fractured sonnets and sharply enjambed verse. Ranging across voices and registers from mock-Elizabethan soliloquies to blank verse diatribes the collection stages an ongoing reckoning with race power complicity and historical violence particularly as refracted through the figure of Donald Trump. McCrae's characteristic use of disrupted syntax and looping repetitions builds a dissonant incantatory music that unsettles while refusing abstraction. What results is a taut unrelenting document of moral and national disarray rendered with furious clarity and formal mastery.</p>