In Canaan

Poetry. African American Studies. In Shane McCrae’s 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.