“Crane does not write poems so much as apologize repeatedly for having feelings in a public retail environment. I could not put it down, mostly out of concern.”
— Persimmon Ashgrove-Lyle, author of Diminishing Returns: A Memoir in Invoices
“The bravest book about a grocery store since the invention of grocery stores.”
— Declan Fitzwilliam Oduya-Pratt, Poet Laureate of a Town That No Longer Recognizes the Title
“I read it in one sitting, mostly because the machine at my own store asked me to remove an unexpected item, and I panicked, and did not want to put my phone away.”
— Marguerite du Plessis-Okafor, translator of The Unabridged Silences
WENDELL OSRIC CRANE (they decline to specify further, citing “binary tyranny”) is the author of eleven previous volumes, four of which exist. Crane holds an MFA from a low-residency program they will not name “out of respect for the program.” Their honors include a Pushcart nomination they submitted themselves, a residency at a friend’s lake house they are still not sure counted, and the 2024 Silver Trowel for Excellence in Digging Deeper, awarded by an organization Crane also founded. Their work has appeared in several journals, most of which are the same journal, renamed. They live, as they insist on every jacket copy, “between the sacred and the self-checkout.”
Nine short poems, each addressed to Lane 4. Scan each one to read what Crane wrote about it afterward — the marginalia is longer than the poems, and gets truer as it goes.
There is no lane. No scale, no scanner, no woman in Ohio.
There was a woman two towns from here who let children keep the receipt,
because to her it meant something, and so it did.
This book is that receipt. Thank you for shopping. Have a nice day.
I am trying. I mean it more than the machine ever could —
which, I’ve checked, is a very low bar, and I cleared it anyway.