In the Language of My Captor
This poetry collection brings together voices shaped by slavery, spectacle, adoption, and linguistic control to ask what captivity and freedom mean. Persona poems and prose close to the author's own memory intersect, probing the contradictions of race and love in America.
Work Information
To speak inside the language of domination is to expose the uncertainty of freedom itself.
Organized around three sequences, the collection sets historical persona poems, narratives of captivity, and prose touching on the author's family history in dialogue. Through poems including those about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis, it reconsiders racialized love, domination, and the ownership of language. No Japanese book edition was confirmed, so the Japanese identifiers are null.
Review Summaries
-
Historical modes of speech and personal memory illuminate one another, revealing how ideas of freedom can be bound to fantasies of domination. The form of the poems itself presses on the reader as an ethical question.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Wesleyan Univ Pr
- Published
- 2017-02-07
- Pages
- 86 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 17.15 x 1.91 x 25.4 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780819577115
- ISBN-10
- 0819577111
- Price
- 5387 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
Finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017) Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love. A reader's companion is available at wesleyan.edu/wespress/readerscompanions.
SHANE MCCRAE is the author of four other books of poetry, including The Animal Too Big to Kill, Mule, Forgiveness Forgiveness , and Blood .
Reviews
-
A Poignant Exploration of Captivity and Freedom
In In the Language of My Captor, Shane McCrae weaves historical persona poems with a prose memoir, addressing the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. His portrayal of Jim Limber, the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis, delves into the complex intersections of racism and love. This collection's powerful narratives invite readers to reflect deeply on America's past and present struggles with identity and oppression.
-
Challenging, but important poetry
I haven’t read a collection of poems by one author in such a long time that I almost forgot how to read poetry. First, I read the poems silently, then I read them out loud, and after that I just opened it up and read the poem I landed on and I’m so glad I took my time because these poems are challenging—in the best way. They need time to be digested, appreciated, and savored because they are complex and deal with themes such as captivity, slavery, racism, and identity. He’s created various characters so it feels like you’re reading poetic narratives or vignettes. Not exactly beach reading (and I did take it to the beach), but I’m so glad I spent time with these poems, and I will of his poems and more poetry in general because now I have poetry back in my life, I realize I’d been missing it.
-
Moving and Indomitable
The beauty in this collection, and in all the characters McCrae invokes, is that they help the hopelessly disconnected to relate to experiences they will never have and while they all must bow to survive, the refuse to be crushed or dominated.
-
Five Stars
This book is unsettling in the best way.