The Gilded Auction Block: Poems

‘Beautifully up-to-date, old-fashioned work, where the dignity of English meters meets, as in a mosh pit, the vitality - and often the brutality - of American speech’ Dan Chiasson, New Yorker

‘Shane McCrae is one of our best, a great poet who mines the rhythms and vernacular of America, excavating the most exquisite of poems. His work is risky, not risque; intelligent, not clever; deep, not jocular surface play. He is sui generis’ Rabih Alameddine

I’m made of murderers I’m made

Of nobodies and immigrants and the poor

and a whole / Family the mother’s

liver and her lungs

In The Gilded Auction Block, the acclaimed poet Shane McCrae considers the present moment in America on its own terms as well as for what it says about the American project and Americans themselves. In the book’s four sections, McCrae alternately responds directly to Donald Trump and contextualizes him historically and personally, exploding the illusions of freedom of both black and white Americans.

A moving, incisive, and frightening exploration of both the legacy and the current state of white supremacy, The Gilded Auction Block is a book about the present that reaches into the past and stretches toward the future.