Well I’m in Heaven now I reckon thisIs Heaven what will I do how will I liveI reckon this is Heaven and I’m aliveFirst I suppose I got to find a houseFirst I suppose I got to find some landTo work first first before I think aboutA house I got I reckon what I gotTo do first I suppose I got to findA man who owns a farm and needs some helpMore than the help he has I reckon allWhite folks got to do is die and waitI reckon help comes to them every daySince they’re in Heaven and black folks die I reckon moneyI’ll never see is waiting on me
Jim Limber Enters the Joint Economy of Heaven and Earth
Shane McCrae
Feature Date
- June 8, 2020
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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Copyright © 2020 by Shane McCrae
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Shane McCrae’s most recent books are In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award, The Gilded Auction Block (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) and Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
New York, New York
In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America’s, as well as his own, racial history.
Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time’s manifold potential to mend.
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