Citizen: An American Lyric

(Paperback)

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The critically acclaimed exploration of mounting racial aggressions in 21st century daily life and in the media 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. Awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in America after becoming the first book in the prize's history to be a finalist in both the poetry and criticism categories, Citizen weaves essays, images and poetry together to form a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our ostensibly "post-race" society.

Reviews

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 -- Nick Laird * 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 -- Smitha Khorana * Guardian *
Rankine brilliantly pushes poetry's forms ... one is left with a mix of emotions that linger and wend themselves into the subconscious -- Holly Bass * 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" -- Dan Chiasson * New Yorker *

Author Bio

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.