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Pulling the chariot of the sun : a memoir of a kidnapping / Shane McCrae.

by McCrae, Shane, 1975-

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Scribner, 2023.

McCrae, Shane, 1975-

McCrae, Shane, 1975- -- Childhood and youth.

Poets, Black -- 21st century -- Biography.

Kidnapping victims -- Texas -- Biography.

Abused children -- United States -- Biography.

9781668021743 (hc.)

1st Scribner hardcover ed.

258 p. ; 22 cm.

"Poet and National Book Award finalist McCrae (In the Language of My Captor) recounts the jaw-dropping circumstances of his childhood in this exceptional memoir. In 1978, when McCrae was three years old, his white supremacist grandparents kidnapped him from Oregon and transported him to Texas, where they raised him as their own child, hoping to 'save' him from the influence of his Black father (his mother, having been abused by her parents, didn't intervene). McCrae was frequently beaten and belittled by his grandfather, who taunted him for being half Black ('You don't want to look like them, do you?'). Never given the full story of his lineage, he began to mix the lies his grandparents told him with his own fuzzy memories of the past -- in one lyrical passage, he remembers running down the aisle of a fabric store 'from illusion to illusion' and into the arms of his grandmother, which he knows can't be true, because she 'wasn't often physically affectionate.' At age 15, McCrae discovered poetry and threw himself into it wholesale; the confidence he drew from writing moved him to find his father, which he hazily recounts here, copping to the fact that his memories of the reunion are choppy and inconsistent. McCrae's account of the abuses he endured are unflinching, but readers will walk away with a stronger sense of awe than pity, both for his resilience and his command of language. This gorgeous meditation on family, race, and identity isn't easy to shake..'"--Publishers Weekly.

Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including 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; Sometimes I Never Suffered, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and his most recent collection, The Many Hundreds of the Scent. McCrae is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Autobiographies.

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