Songs and Sonnets by Shane McCrae
Broken Sleep Books
Published 31st October 2025.
Shane McCrae's Songs and Sonnets is a restless, formally intricate collection that interrogates American mythologies, political decay, and racial memory through fractured rhythms and volatile lyric. Composed largely of sonnets””Elizabethan, Petrarchan, Spenserian, and warped variations””the collection wields tradition as both frame and provocation. McCrae's syntax resists smooth reading, enacting the dissonance of a nation unravelled and a speaker caught within its fictions. Moving between historical indictment, surreal speculation, and intimate reckoning, these poems inhabit a space where language buckles under pressure but refuses collapse.
Shane McCrae's Songs and Sonnets is a restless, formally intricate collection that interrogates American mythologies, political decay, and racial memory through fractured rhythms and volatile lyric. Composed largely of sonnets””Elizabethan, Petrarchan, Spenserian, and warped variations””the collection wields tradition as both frame and provocation. McCrae's syntax resists smooth reading, enacting the dissonance of a nation unravelled and a speaker caught within its fictions. Moving between historical indictment, surreal speculation, and intimate reckoning, these poems inhabit a space where language buckles under pressure but refuses collapse.
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