At a moment when we have become accustomed to hearing from figures like Jonathan Franzen that experimental or “difficult” literature is no longer relevant, and that poetry, especially, is almost doomed to reach a small, coterie audience, Citizen’s wide success is impressive. It was also named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and was cited as a major achievement when Rankine received Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize. The book received the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the 2015 PEN Open Book Award. In a moment when police brutality and killings of African Americans have spurred widespread anger, protest, and debate, and when the world of poetry has been focused on issues of race and privilege, from Rankine and Tony Hoagland’s 2011 exchange at the AWP conference to more recent controversies around Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, Citizen must be read as both a poetic work and a political work, a meditation on activist struggles and literary aesthetics. PUBLISHED a little more than a year ago, in October 2014, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric remains a timely, even urgent meditation on race, violence, racism, art, and mediation. 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.On Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric 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 Lyric.Ĭlaudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more.

The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. * Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry *

Claudia rankine books