Shane McCrae is a mixed-race American poet, who, at the age of three, was taken to Texas by his grandparents – who were white supremacists – away from his black father who had, until then, been bringing him up. It was an unhappy childhood and he stopped paying attention at school until he discovered poetry (responding, as many unhappy teenagers do, to Sylvia Plath’s work). His faith that he would one day become a poet was unswerving – even after dropping out of formal education. And perhaps it was as simple as this: he knew he would become a poet because he was one. Now, he is a teacher at Columbia. That is the potted biography ­– but there is nothing potted about his unusual and unbridled poetry.

Many poems in The Gilded Auction Block address the US directly, alongside its president. The idea is in a great tradition (think of Allen Ginsberg’s America, Danez Smith’s Dear White America or even, in its less embattled way, Walt Whitman’s One Song, America, Before I Go). The collection opens with The President Visits the Storm, demonstrating Trump’s imperviousness towards the victims of Hurricane Harvey. A few pages in, Everything I Know About Blackness I Learned from Donald Trump almost does not need the poem to unpack its title. The sense, throughout, is of an America with selective hearing and Trump as a complacently grotesque Goliath, against whom a poet must aim a particularly sharp stone.

Purchase – one of McCrae’s best poems – confronts an America in which McCrae, passing a building site, is asked by a white man:

So are you guys just drying out the floor here

The pauses in the poems are political: they interrupt the narrative, the stalling powerfully suggestive of an imperfect freedom of speech.

Remembering My White Grandmother Who Loved Me and Hated Everybody Like Me concerns a car accident (it would seem his grandmother was driving):

His false sighting of the black man – his grandmother’s sworn enemy – was opportunistic; the hope was that his grandmother would buy him a gun for self-defence. There was so much from which McCrae needed to defend himself, his grandmother included.

In Sometimes I Never Suffered, the title’s quarrel between “sometimes” and “never” prepares one for conflict. He goes beyond recollected hardship into a vertiginously Miltonic vision. In his raggedly imperfect creation myth, a “hastily assembled angel” falls from grace, only it turns out to be more push than fall:

Inarticulacy becomes a form of eloquence in this exploration of being cast out and an outcast.

In McCrae’s hands, poetry is reclamation. It is also transport: writing a way out and through. In Seawhere, he explains:

He has to “borrow an inner life” in a white-supremacist world. The gain, for his readers, is that he has chosen to make poetry the public space in which to express – and to own – his inner life.

• The Gilded Auction Block by Shane McCrae is published by Corsair (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15

• Sometimes I Never Suffered by Shane McCrae is published by Corsair (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15