PULLING THE CHARIOT OF THE SUN

A poet describes a traumatic upbringing after being kidnapped.

McCrae, a Guggenheim fellow, Whiting and Lannan Literary Award winner, and professor of writing at Columbia, was 3 years old when he was kidnapped from his father by his maternal grandparents, who were White supremacists. It took him years to understand what had happened—to even associate the word kidnap with himself—and his new book traces his attempt to reconstruct meaning from a life that was rooted, early on, in lies and abuse. The author’s father was Black, his mother was White, and his grandparents carried a deeply ingrained racism. McCrae is an acclaimed poet, and the tools of that trade are evident here, as he emphasizes metaphors, symbols, and images over character. He writes of his grandfather: “I know my life continued after him, like a plant growing alone in a hole the size of a house. Here I am in my life, in the middle of it, but I have buried so many memories of my life with my grandfather that my life is like a plant grown in a house-sized hole, a void.” McCrae’s attention to word choice is studied and precise, and at times, he repeats certain words or phrases: “We left the Piggly Wiggly carrying something red. My grandfather left the Piggly Wiggly carrying something red. Or the packaging was mostly another color, but the product inside the packaging was red, and was represented by an attractively staged photograph, mostly red.” The first half of the text sings with a gorgeously wrought tension. In the second half, however, the tension starts to sag. In these chapters, McCrae is a young teenager learning to skateboard, but his prose doesn’t carry the nearly excruciating tautness of the early pages. Still, as a whole, the book is original and satisfying.

Intricately wrought and unrelenting in its honesty.