Shane McCrae, New and Collected Hell: A Poem (2025)

New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book-length poem by Shane McCrae, “is an audacious effort to stage a tour of the underworld in an almost painfully post-millennial context and vernacular,” Elisa Gonzalez writes. The poem follows the journey of a poet and his guide, a “robot bird” named Law, through a carefully documented landscape of Hell. Suffering depicted is physical and gruesome, and unlike in Dante, the logic of punishment often remains opaque. According to David Woo, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time.”    —Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė

Contributed by Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė