The End of the Alphabet

Tue, 03 Feb 1998 16:02:13 +0200

These poems — intrepid, obsessive, and erotic — tell the story of a woman's attempt to overcome despair. Claudia Rankine, whose first collection was the prize-winning Nothing in Nature is Private, creates a transfixing testimonial to a woman facing her own disease. Drawing on voices from Jane Eyre to Lady MacBeth, Rankine welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque, courting paradox into the center of her voice.

The White Card

Sun, 16 Dec 2018 15:57:03 +0200

A play about the imagined fault line between black and white lives by Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen

The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama. The scenes in this one-act play, for all the characters' disagreements, stalemates, and seeming impasses, explore what happens if one is willing to stay in the room when it is painful to bear the pressure to listen and the obligation to respond.
—from the introduction by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine's first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?

Composed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming artist Charlotte. Their conversation about art and representations of race spirals toward the devastation of Virginia and...

American Poets in the 21st Century

Sun, 16 Dec 2018 15:57:02 +0200

Just Us

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 16:02:05 +0200

Citizen_An American Lyric

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 08:43:34 +0200

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.

Review

Praise 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. . . . 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 [Rankine's] meditations on race. . . . Powerful." —Kirkus Reviews** "Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. 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. 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. 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 . . . She has made of her savage and stern intelligence, her ruthlessness and her terror, great art. She has made poetry an astonishment again. All of us who write are most profoundly in her debt, as all who read will be in her power.” —Louise Glück, American Poet

About the Author

Claudia Rankine is the author of four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. She currently is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Pomona College.