Mule: 10th Anniversary Edition

Finalist for 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award. Finalist for 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award. 10th anniversary edition of Shane McCrae’s groundbreaking first collection of poetry, MULE, first published in 2011. With new Poems by the author and an introduction by Victoria Chang.

‘Imagine // welcoming the wound, ’ McCrae writes in his frontispiece poem, ‘The Cardinal Is The Marriage Bird.’ McCrae not only acquiesces to the wound in Mule, but he revises the wound through language, and in the process, we are in the midst of beauty. I hope that a new generation of readers, through this tenth anniversary edition, will be able to experience the skillful contradictions within McCrae’s language, and be opened up and broken in the same way that I was when I first read this stunning and singular book.–Victoria Chang

MULE is a book both haunted and haunting–possessed by sound and its tremendous momentum, that somehow-suspended momentum, hypnotic in its rhythms and compelling in its headlong fall into the truth of the heart.–Cole Swensen

Shane McCrae admits us to the marriage of impediments… in a country that too often insists on fracture over union.–Rachel Loden

What a joy now to discover a voice such as Shane McCrae’s, who… finds his new music, and compels us with its outbursts and heartbreak and yells and stuttering of joy and its sudden clarity of perception that is like no other. Shane McCrae is a master.–Ilya Kaminsky

Some books come down like gods dying to transform us out of our empty, shattered lives. MULE is such a book… McCrae’s is a living, breathing poetry made of wisdom and wrenching song.–Katie Ford

Poetry.