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Shane McCrae (2013)
Author's Statement
Had I not been fortunate enough to receive an NEA Fellowship this year, I don't know how I would have managed to push money worries from me and away to a tolerable distance. The fellowship has made--and continues to make--my work possible. And it's through my work that I make sense, as best I can, of and with my position in the world. But it's more important to me that my poems have some usefulness for any readers they might have, and I'm most grateful for the opportunity the fellowship affords me to keep trying to make something that might be beneficial to others.
The Crowd Shouted and Hollered Cut off before burning him his Fingers his fingers off wanted his fingers Fresh and could sell them Later in town and didn't want his fingers burned black / Cut off his fingers held his fingers high Mostly a clear day and the crowd shouted and hollered and They couldn't see the fingers there was so much blood could only see the blood could see The fingers there was so much blood / They couldn't tell the fingers from the white man's fingers / It looked as if the white man had cut his own fingers off But who what sane man would cut his own fingers off (from Blood, Noeni Press, 2013)
National Endowment for the Arts · an independent federal agency
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Shane McCrae is the author of Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), as well as three chapbooks--most recently, Nonfiction, which won the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition. He work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and he has received a Whiting Writer's Award and a fellowship from the NEA. Photo courtesy of the artist
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