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9781555976903
Overview
Overview
* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry *
* 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. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award *
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . .
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.
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. 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. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. 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.
- Format: TradePaperback
- Author: Rankine, Claudia
- ISBN: 9781555976903
- Condition: Used
- Dimensions: 7.90 x 0.50
- Number Of Pages: 160
- Publication Year: 2014
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Urgent Poetry
Christine B. - 3 years 2 months agoCitizen is a book of poetry that reads a little more like an essay due to it's social commentary and sense of urgency. It's a powerful book, it's harsh and will call out the reader and the whole system in which we live. It's a quick read with just over 150 pages. Do yourself a favor and read this book.
HPB Staff Review -
Appropriate Times...
Matthew G. - 5 years 3 months agoA wonderful read for anyone wanting to delve into the racial and social injustices that have plagued our country. At a time where solidarity is needed before most other things, this book will open your eyes to the plights of African American citizens and start an internal dialogue with how we must engage with each other to better our country.
HPB Staff Review -
An important contemporary work.
Nick C. - 5 years 9 months agoClaudia Rankine's much lauded collection of poetic essays, Citizen, is fierce and regrettably timeless. She examines the myriad ways racism and sexism intersect, compound, and permeate American culture-subtly inflected in our conversation, manifesting violently, or implemented politically. In one essay, Rankine rightly objects to New York City's stop-and-frisk policy; besides violating civil rights, such procedures encourage the abuse and fervent scrutinizing of minorities. "And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always fitting the description," she laments and repeats throughout the essay, as if renumerating the policy's multiple failings. Such instances, Rankine reminds us, are never singular. Citizen is reminiscent of Cornelius Eady's collection, Brutal Imagination, and Toi Derricott's, The Black Notebooks, in its intelligence and candidness. All three works examine the demonization and exclusion of outsiders in contemporary America, how perceiving them as faceless makes it easier to discriminate. Rankine quotes a Hurricane Katrina victim in another essay, "'We never reached out to anyone to tell our story, because there's no ending to our story, he said.'" The struggle, Rankine suggests, is not from without. The struggle is to be heard, to fight erasure.
HPB Staff Review -
A beautiful and powerful exploration of the black experience in America
K.T. M. - 7 years 5 months agoOriginally published by Graywolf Press in October 2014, Citizen: An American Lyric presents an original, critical perspective on the black experience in America. Simultaneously personal and outward-looking, it is as nuanced as it is scathing. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Rankine is a playwright, essayist, and poet. Citizen was nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry and has been described as having "boundary-bending potency" by critic Michael Lindgren. It is an amalgamation of prose, poetry, and visual art that combines personal experiences with the author's own style of criticism. I'm an avid reader of arts-related titles, and when this title was recommended on a list of best independently published books of 2014, I was curious about how Rankine combined visual art with other literary forms. In overall length, it is quite short, and will probably take about two hours to read. But the impact of this volume is lasting, and worth a second or third read-through. She uses sports references to draw on the unlikely tale of Serena Williams who has risen to become an unequivocal star of tennis, a predominantly white sport, illustrating how even at the top of her game, the color of her skin has consequences. Rankine also writes about the 2006 World Cup where, in the 110th minute, Algerian player Zinedine Zidane head-butted a player on the opposing team in response to a suspected racial slur, which made international headlines. Short anecdotes of everyday experience are juxtaposed against events in the international spotlight the kind of experiences that most of us take for granted, such as standing in line at a shop, yet regularly being made to feel invisible. Rankine's writing is a deeply invested emotional journey through her own experience, yet she manages to detach at the moments when you, the reader, are able to process what she has given you. Her poetic prose is punctuated with examples of contemporary art that both illustrate points she makes as well as make points of their own. Most are standalone and more effective for it. Amidst the social and political events and responses to police brutality in Jacksonville, Ferguson, Baltimore, and more, Graywolf Press has, with second and third printings of the book, updated pages 134 and 135 to account for the lost lives of Jordan Russell Davis, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and John Crawford. I happened to read the third printing of this book, but it was a moment of clarity to understand that in this work the issues are not only presented as current and unflinching, but actually glaring. Both Rankine and Graywolf Press comprehend the power that a piece of art can have on its viewer or reader to make issues (which we might already be aware of) reach out and touch us-to make connections and to illuminate experiences, issues, and ideas that can influence us in a way other mediums cannot. In no uncertain terms, Citizen is truly a piece of our time.
HPB Staff Review