Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems
Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, the seventh collection from the award-winning poet

I think now more than half

Of life is death but I can’t die

Enough for all the life I see

In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America’s racial history, as well as his own.

Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time’s manifold potential to mend.

1133550169
Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems
Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, the seventh collection from the award-winning poet

I think now more than half

Of life is death but I can’t die

Enough for all the life I see

In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America’s racial history, as well as his own.

Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time’s manifold potential to mend.

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Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems

Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems

by Shane McCrae
Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems

Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems

by Shane McCrae

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Overview

Spanning religious, historical, and political themes, the seventh collection from the award-winning poet

I think now more than half

Of life is death but I can’t die

Enough for all the life I see

In Sometimes I Never Suffered, his seventh collection of poems, Shane McCrae remains “a shrewd composer of American stories” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Here, an angel, hastily thrown together by his fellow residents of Heaven, plummets to Earth in his first moments of consciousness. Jim Limber, the adopted mixed-race son of Jefferson Davis, wanders through the afterlife, reckoning with the nuances of America’s racial history, as well as his own.

Sometimes I Never Suffered is a search for purpose and atonement, freedom and forgiveness, imagining eternity not as an escape from the past or present, but as a reverberating record and as the culmination of time’s manifold potential to mend.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374602918
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 08/03/2021
Pages: 112
Sales rank: 998,339
Product dimensions: 5.08(w) x 8.04(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry: The Gilded Auction Block; In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; The Animal Too Big to Kill, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky / Editor’s Choice Award; Forgiveness Forgiveness; Blood; and Mule. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface

Jim Limber in Heaven Is a Nexus at Which the Many Heavens of the Multiverse Converge

1. Fresh Eyes for a Fresh World

The Hastily Assembled Angel Falls at the Beginning of the World

The Wings of the Hastily Assembled Angel

The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers What It Means to Be Made in the Image Of

The Hastily Assembled Angel Also Sustains the World

The Hastily Assembled Angel on Care and Vitality

The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers His Own Foreknowing

The Hastily Assembled Angel Meets the God of Human Freedom

The Hastily Assembled Angel at the Gate

The Tree of Knowledge

The Loneliness of the Hastily Assembled Angel

The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers the Duties Owed to Love

The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers the Lives of Dogs and of People

2. Variations on Jim Limber Goes to Heaven

Jim Limber Tells the Truth About His Fate

Jim Limber’s Home Is No Earthly Home

Jim Limber Describes His Arrival in Heaven

Jim Limber Refuses to Enter Heaven Until He Has Lived a Happy Life

Jim Limber Enters the Joint Economy of Heaven and Earth

Jim Limber on the Inability of the Enslaved to See Themselves

Jim Limber’s Theodicy

Jim Limber on the Ever-Growing Hunger for the New

Jim Limber Sees People Get the Heaven They Want

Jim Limber on the White Embrace

Old Times There

Limbo

Jim Limber Burning Where No Fire Is

2. Variations on Jim Limber Goes to Heaven

Jim Limber on the Gates of Heaven

Jim Limber on the Peace Which Passeth All Understanding

Jesus and the Mongrel Dog

Jim Limber on the Heavenly Reward

Jim Limber in Heaven Writes His Name in Water

Heaven in Heaven

Jim Limber on the Gardens of the Face of God

Jim Limber on Continuity in Heaven

Jim Limber Tells What He Knows About Heaven

Jim Limber on Possibility

1. Fresh Eyes for a Fresh World

The Ladder to Heaven

Acknowledgments

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