Books by Shane Book

At once original, strange, funny, and unnerving, Shane Book's Congotronic takes the reader into unstable territory, where multiple layers of voice, diction, and music collide. Some of these poems have the sparse directness of a kind of bleak prayer; others mingle the earthbound rhythms of hip-hop with the will-to-transcendence of high Romanticism.

A powerful and unflinching sort of documentary poetics. This collection bears elegiac witness to the effects of global politics on individual lives. Shane Book's poems carry us to Uganda, Ghana, Mali, Trinidad, and Canada's west coast; from a religious sacrifice in Tarahumara, Mexico, to Book's ailing grandfather's bedside.