SOME FRESH HELL

The poet Shane McCrae journeys through the land of the damned.

- ELISA GONZALEZ

Along Interstate 71, in a flat stretch of Ohio, an otherwise modest billboard proclaims that “HELL IS REAL.” The type, set against a black backdrop, is white, except for the “H,” which is painted a red that in certain lights flickers orange. The sign is meant to give passing drivers an eschatological jolt, and it has become a much photographed landmark—enough of a fixture that it has its own listing on Google Maps. The simplicity of its message and the vulgarity of its medium make it an exemplar of religious expression in this American moment, as if God (or maybe Satan) placed an ad. Yet its stark certainty feels like a transmission from an earlier, less complicated world.

What is Hell, these days? “New and Collected Hell” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book-length poem by Shane McCrae, is an audacious effort to stage a tour of the underworld in an almost painfully post-millennial context and vernacular. McCrae’s Hell contains a human-resources “bunker,” conducts intake interviews, shows the damned on screens that hang above gray cubicles sprawling endlessly in all directions, and communicates—pure evil—by fax machine only. The Devil must be reimagined for each age.

McCrae, who teaches at Columbia University, is a celebrated Black poet who has published nine previous collections of poetry and a memoir, “Pulling the Chariot of the Sun.” His fifth book, “In the Language of My Captor” (2017), was a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry. His work often explores America’s racial agon and its brutal history of enslavement. He has a long-standing affinity for allegorical settings, and many of his poems take place in skewed versions of a Christian afterworld. (Parts of “New and Collected Hell” appeared in “The Gilded Auction Block,” from 2019, and “Cain Named the Animal,” from 2022.)