New and collected hell A poem

Poet (Cain Named the Animal, 2022) and memoirist (Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, 2023) McCrae has gathered his "hell" poems together in one volume. This is Dante's journey reconceived as if hell were the setting of an action movie. Instead of Virgil as his guide, the much-mutilated figure of the poet is guided by a robot bird voiced by an insult comic who has watched a lot of The Office. Hell isn't other people, it's a corporation. "Intake Interview" is the equivalent of the ninth circle of hell in an HR "bunker." McCrae devotes a great deal of attention to the mechanics of hell--elevators, jumbotrons, doors, mountains that sweat and move, inky dark spaces, and the most golden of golden lights. No matter the stanza forms, the majority of lines include gaps that create gaping caesuras. Among the expletives, the degradation, and the tortures that combine Rube Goldberg contraptions and Bugs Bunny physics, are gleaming lyric fragments, such as "Hell / Is sorrow's Heaven where it goes to live forever with // Its god the human body."