In place of smug moral judgments, Rankine contrives a mosaic of intimate vignettes and tense hypotheses the whole has a complexity and density that makes it, I believe, the most devastating and convincing political poetry written by an American within memory.
Citizen is Rankine's Spoon River Anthology, an epic as large and frightening and beautiful as the country and various emotional states that produced it." -Hilton AlsPraise for Don’t Let Me Be Lonely“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely records or annotates separate discrete episodes of consciousness these accumulate, in this extraordinary book, into what seems less a sequence than a set of overlapping patterns. Its various realities-'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life-are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. Powerful." -Kirkus Reviews** "Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. Once again Rankine inspires sympathy and outrage, but most of all a will to take a deep look at ourselves and our society." -Publishers Weekly, starred review"A prism of personal perspectives illuminates meditations on race. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen* is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.ReviewPraise for Citizen:Finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in PoetryOne of the Millions Most Anticipated Books"Accounts of racially charged interactions, insidious and flagrant, transpiring in private and in the public eye, distill the immediate emotional intensity of individual experience with tremendous precision while allowing ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and exhaustion to remain in all their fraught complexity.
Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book *Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American LyricClaudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media.
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