In this moving, critical and fiercely intelligent collection of prose poems, Claudia Rankine examines the experience of race and racism in Western society through sharp vignettes of everyday discrimination and prejudice, and longer meditations on the violence - whether linguistic or physical - which has impacted the lives of Serena Williams, Zinedine Zidane, Mark Duggan and others.
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and the bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Wonderfully capacious and innovative. In her riffs on the demotic,
in her layering of incident, Rankine finds a new way of writing
about race in America
*New York Review of Books*
Citizen feels raw ... this documentary-style look at America has
catapulted Rankine into the spotlight ... She speaks to the vastly
different ways racism and injustice are perpetuated across class
lines in America today
*Guardian*
Rankine brilliantly pushes poetry's forms ... one is left with a
mix of emotions that linger and wend themselves into the
subconscious
*The New York Times*
What does it mean to be a black citizen in the US of the early
twenty-first century? Claudia Rankine's brilliant, terse and
parabolic prose poems have a shock value rarely found in poetry.
These tales of everyday life - whether the narrator's or the lives
of young black men like Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson -
dwell on the most normal exteriors and the most ordinary of daily
situations so as to expose what is really there: a racism so
guarded and carefully masked as to make it all the more insidious
... Citizen is an unforgettable book
*Marjorie Perloff*
An especially vital book for this moment in time ... The
realization at the end of this book sits heavily upon the heart:
"This is how you are a citizen," Rankine writes. "Come on. Let it
go. Move on." As Rankine's brilliant, disabusing work, always aware
of its ironies, reminds us, "moving on" is not synonymous with
"leaving behind"
*New Yorker*
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