Songs and Sonnets

Songs and Sonnets 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.