Wyatt Mason Writes about Poet Shane McCrae’s Memoir for the New York Times Magazine

In his new memoir Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, poet Shane McCrae explores the rupture that resulted from being taken at age 3 from his Black father by his white grandparents, writes Wyatt Mason, Bard College writer in residence, for the New York Times. “The weird thing about growing up kidnapped,” McCrae told Mason, “is if it happens early enough, there’s a way in which you kind of don’t know.” The narrative McCrae unfolds as he tries to piece together the truth of his past winds across American landscapes, the inner world of his childhood experiences, the emotional and physical abuse he suffered, and finding his father again as a teenager. McCrae’s book “is both an unambiguous story of abduction and a convoluted story of complicity,” writes Mason. He adds, “The memoir accumulates a hugeness of feeling that puts a lie to the idea that difficulty in a piece of writing is necessarily cold or aloof or incompatible with the kind of intense emotion that McCrae’s narrative uncommonly yields.”

Post Date: 08-01-2023