In Shane McCrae’s astonishing second chapbook, In Canaan, he inhabits the personae of the escaped slave Margaret Garner, who, in the mid-1800s, murdered one of her daughters in order to keep her from returning to slavery. “I couldn’t stop/Hurting her because it hurt,” writes McCrae in the voice of Garner, “Before that night I never had the chance to love / Anyone/ she was the first person I loved.” McCrae composes in broken forms and shattered fragments, retelling a harrowing historical story through the imagined first-person point of view of its tortured and terrified heroine. Shane McCrae is the author of Mule (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010), In Canaan (Rescue Press, 2010), and One Neither One (Octopus Books, 2009). His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2010, The American Poetry Review, African American Review, Agni, The Kenyon Review, Octopus Magazine, Typo, and others. He went to school at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workhop and Harvard Law, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa.