Shane McCrae appeared in Issue 25 with Threshold, Poem About a Car Made of Words, and A Short Note Explaining the Long Wait. Marriage, longing, bodily threat, comic disaster, and surreal interruption give the group its volatile emotional range.
Shane McCrae in the historical archive
Issue 25’s contributor note records McCrae’s 2004 graduation from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his studies at Harvard Law School, and poems in American Letters & Commentary, GutCult, and Octopus. The note also places him in Cambridge with his wife, poet Erica Fiedler, and their son Nicholas.
Threshold
Threshold unfolds through repeated departures and a sequence of sections that keep returning to marriage, houses, loneliness, clothing, animals, labor, and imagined escape. The speaker’s language swings between absurdity and emotional exposure with remarkable speed.
Poem About a Car Made of Words
The second poem compresses bodily injury, snow, a bench, ideas, and a scar-like fixture into a brief scene. Its title announces verbal construction while the poem itself offers a dark, broken sequence of physical images.
A Short Note Explaining the Long Wait
The final poem moves through organ donation, cartoon animals, fear, hat size, headbands, running, and a plea for the lover to return. Intimacy takes shape through bizarre acts of calculation and escalating declarations.
Longing and comic pressure
Across all three poems, McCrae lets comedy intensify emotional pressure. Coyotes, clip-on suits, mouse-shaped tasers, brittle shirts, and absurd calculations carry real loneliness, marital strain, desire, and vulnerability.
Further reading
Continue through the archive’s guide to imagery in poetry, its page on sound in poetry, and its overview of modern poetry.