New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae

New and Collected Hell: A Poem

by Shane McCrae

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025

It’s part and parcel of the contemporary American poetry scene to be bewildered. The sum of each encounter varies by degrees, of course, ranging from staggering bedazzlement and bemused befuddlement to flat-out derangement. In the case of Shane McCrae’s latest book, New and Collected Hell: A Poem, the reader’s tally touches just about every increment on the sliding scale. Most bewildering of all is the way the book manages to sore and plummet from one page to the next.

It’s an uneven book, to be sure, but its overriding commitment to a single form goes a long way toward smoothing the folds. This is, rather refreshingly, a long, largely cohesive narrative poem conceived in the spirit of Dante, its narrator descending to hell. The poem conducts various typographical experiments along the way, but no line, however tortured, ever strays from the book’s billing as a tour through the underworld, one not quite guided (as in Dante’s case, by the Ancient Roman poet Virgil), but goaded by a sadistic robot bird, who explodes into the poem on page three, barking: “Hey       fuck you / fucking       shithead follow me.”

And the narrator, who was lost in a wood on page one, then adrift on a skiff on page two, decides to follow—paddling along until (page five) the lake vanishes and he finds himself falling.

I fell a whole       lifetime of fall

-ing as I fell       and as I fell I

Fell through my life I watched my life

Projected       on the walls of the hole

I fell through but projected through

No lens no carried by no light

While other stanzas flow like lava, or march in quatrains, or swivel about the page like a revolving sprinkler, McCrae’s favorite formal device is the gapped (or “sprung”) line, which makes evident sense in the lines above: these gaps offer visual amplification for the long way down to hell. But in most cases—and the gapping tendency is chronic, the book’s unshakable tic—the same gratuitous spacing merely hampers the poetry, frustrating rhythm before it can find its feet.

Nor has McCrae done his poem any great service by swearing off punctuation (save for the occasional shim of a hyphen tucked between lines). Stuttering but headlong, this is poetry which, at its very worst, fails even to pass muster as decent prose. There’s no real momentum here, only velocity.

I stood       and gasping staggered into

The darkness past the corpses       there I

Saw the man who       had risen and walked

And who as waves       are freed and roll

Across a tub       only to break

Against the belly of the man

Who freed them climbing in       the man who

Had risen was free       only to walk

From one oblivion to another

From noise to all I saw       was empty

Darkness       and I followed him

But caught him only after we

Had walked too far to hear the voices

Although the beetle’s orange belly

Still pulsed in the distance like a turning

Lighthouse beam       or a house burning

On a far shore

And yet there’s something irresistible about it all. Despite a self-sabotaging tendency toward oblivion, the book’s several liabilities ultimately prove powerless against its greatest asset—the sane decipherability of a continuous story—sometimes even conspiring to elevate its expression.

It’s a story of perennial interest, a crossover genre all its own, encompassing such tirelessly debated and endlessly fascinating elements as the afterlife, eternity, suffering, and demons. Despite the attending baggage, McCrae’s purpose is neither philosophical nor theological. His narrator is an everyman, and the hell he depicts is the real deal, as far as the poet’s imagination is concerned, nothing about it smacking of metaphor or allegory.

And though McCrae has written elsewhere, autobiographically, about his own hellish travails, his poem gains steam precisely because of the lengths it goes to envision such a patently supernatural experience, one that stretches to encompasses exploding bodies and recomposing ones, a mountain streaming flesh-colored sweat, plants that look like “tumbleweeds but red and made of veins,” a golden elevator shaft to a deeper hell yet, and much, much more. Grim as anything, fast in a way that poetry is rarely sustained, it’s a fantasy-adventure story with an unexpectedly marvelous conclusion, and it may just be worth learning to live with (perhaps even warm up to) its various habits of distraction. Those who do are in for a blood-soaked tumble of a reading experience quite unlike anything else.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California