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	FURTHER READING


		Poems by Shane McCrae
		The Ballad of Cathay Williams William Cathay

		Whose Story of Us We Is Told Is Us


		Poems about Reading
		from Please Bury Me in This by Allison Benis White

		After Reading Lao Tzu by Amy Newlove Schroeder

		Book Loaned to Tom Andrews by Bobby C. Rogers

		Books by Gerald Stern

		Burning of the Three Fires by Jeanne Marie Beaumont

		Forgetfulness by Billy Collins

		Hans Reading, Hans Smoking by Liam Rector

		How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual by Pamela Spiro Wagner

		Inspire Hope by Amy Lawless

		Learning to Read by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

		Light By Which I Read by Eric Pankey

		Love For This Book by Pablo Neruda

		My First Memory (of Librarians) by Nikki Giovanni

		One Train May Hide Another by Kenneth Koch

		Passerby, These are Words by Yves Bonnefoy

		Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet by Tony Hoagland

		Reading Novalis in Montana by Melissa Kwasny

		Shawl by Albert Goldbarth

		Stet Stet Stet by Ange Mlinko

		The Author to Her Book by Anne Bradstreet

		The Land of Story-books by Robert Louis Stevenson

		The Reader by Richard Wilbur

		The Secret by Denise Levertov

		There is no frigate like a book (1263) by Emily Dickinson

		To the Reader by Jena Osman

		To the Reader: If You Asked Me by Chase Twichell

		Untitled [I closed the book and changed my life] by Bruce Smith

		Why I Am Afraid of Turning the Page by Cate Marvin

		You Begin by Margaret Atwood

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The Best Thing Anyone Ever Said About Paul Celan

by Shane McCrae

Today you will the     say the any ever

best thing any ever anyone

Said about Paul Celan

The world is if it isn’t     does it matter isn’t

waiting     or it might be might as well

Be if it knew     and some

People for some     people the wait is mostly it’s

a world in which the fact of Paul Celan

was and is always will have been and be

A fact and necessary     living in such a world

is the far greater agony the wait is no

agony     not compared to living in that world it is

Absurd to say he wouldn’t Paul Celan would recognize it still

No person ever is naive

but populations are naive and always will be

even innocent

is the far greater agony

It is     / More like a toothache

the pain of the wait for some

More like a pain in the hole from which

You even now prepare yourself to speak

About this poem:

"As I wrote this poem, I was thinking, or trying to think, about wars, especially the horrors of our recent wars, and about individual and collective responsibility. But the whole time I was also thinking about Paul Celan’s work--that I don't understand it at all, that I love it, that loving it feels wrong--and about individual and collective responsibility."

--Shane McCrae

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