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.” —from Victoria Chang’s introduction

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PRAISE FOR MULE:

Finalist for 2012 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

Finalist for 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award

[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

With an unerring sense of music, in rhythms as insistent and ungraspable as a recurring dream, McCrae’s poems approximate the sound of the subconscious, of what the mind does with words when it isn’t using them intentionally but murmuring to itself consolingly and censoriously of its own imperfectly recorded history. AMELIA KLEIN, BOSTON REVIEW

[T]he tension taking place in Mule between the poems’ collapsing sonnet-like forms and the highly emotional material (the end of love, fatherhood, race, and loss) will slay you as it did me. OLIVER DE LA PAZ, LIT HUB

While Mule is prosodically rich, it also explores personal history, race, and religion at length, as well as giving new versions of confessional and devotional poetry. LINDSAY TURNER, KENYON REVIEW

[Mule] is unsettlingly graceful in its treatment of dire subjects; the sublime that animates the voice betrays the animal conditions, fragility, and fallibility of the voice. MICAH BATEMAN, THE IOWA REVIEW

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Shane McCrae’s most recent books are Sometimes I Never Suffered, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and The Gilded Auction Block, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has received a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.