Shane McCrae is the author of the chapbooks One Neither One (Octopus Books) and In Canaan (Rescue Press). His work has appeared in African American Review, Agni, The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Effing Magazine, Typo and The Best American Poetry 2010. He holds degrees from Linfield College, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Harvard Law School, and is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Iowa. He is married, and has three children.

Books by Shane McCrae:

Other poems on the web by Shane McCrae:
Three poems
"In No Place"
"Mulatto"
"How I Know"
Two poems

About Mule:

"This astonishing, extremely beautiful book is, in a way, a new twist on the epithalamion, tracing the innumerable and inescapable marriages that fissure our lives. And it traces them with an eerie repetitive force that, while echoing the edgier experiments of Modernism, still manages to feel utterly unfamiliar. It’s 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

"In his first book, Mule, Shane McCrae admits us to the marriage of impediments (‘Half donkey and half human being’) in a country that too often insists on fracture over union. McCrae’s ‘mulatto’ sings us through mash-ups of race and class, even as he divorces us from ‘the bud and green of May,’ its more random cruelties and collateral damage. ‘You / Will recognize yourself in the singing you / Will not recognize yourself in the songs,’ he says, but (because he is a singer of prodigious gifts) we do—and in that inlet of recognition we are goners. Mule is a splendid and heartbreaking debut."
—Rachel Loden

"Syntax is the facility of the soul, O’Hara taught us, and somehow in the first decade of the 21st century, our poets decided to separate syntax and what compels us, as if the two weren’t of the same element—as if we read no Berryman and memorized no Shakespeare, and as if their punctuation did not stop our breath! What a joy now to discover a voice such as Shane McCrae’s, who in this first decade of a new century 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. Never shying away from sudden confusions of pain and beauty, Shane McCrae’s questions are not why so much pain? why so much beauty? but, instead, how can they remake us? McCrae’s is a living, breathing poetry made of wisdom and wrenching song."
—Katie Ford