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Citizen: An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine

4.27 · Rating details · 37,690 ratings · 3,544 reviews

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 intenti ...more

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Paperback, 169 pages

Published October 7th 2014 by Graywolf Press

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Dec 05, 2015 Bill Kerwin rated it really liked it

Shelves: black-studies, biography, poetry

Do you remember that incident early in the primary campaign in 2016 when a young black woman staged a silent protest by reading a book during a Trump rally? Well, this is the book, and I think you should read it too. It covers some of the same ground as Coates' Between the World and Me, but Rankine is older and perhaps wiser. And Rankine got there first.

Her book is a well-constructed bricolage of anecdote, poetry, criticism, and multi-media presentation, expertly designed by Rankine's photograph
Do you remember that incident early in the primary campaign in 2016 when a young black woman staged a silent protest by reading a book during a Trump rally? Well, this is the book, and I think you should read it too. It covers some of the same ground as Coates' Between the World and Me, but Rankine is older and perhaps wiser. And Rankine got there first.

Her book is a well-constructed bricolage of anecdote, poetry, criticism, and multi-media presentation, expertly designed by Rankine's photographer husband John Lucas. The book presents us with the experiences of Rankine, a black woman, a poet and an esteemed professor, as she confronts and endures the thoughtless (or malicious?) everyday words and actions of white people in America, many of whom are her friends. (Examples: when they call you by the name of “that other black person they know,” when they cut in front of you in line, when they use racist language, when they just don't seem to see you at all.)

She also meditates upon these events, generalizes from them, and presents us with incidents which help to illuminate them, from the “temper tantrums” of Serena Williams to the death of Trayvon Martin and Obama's botched oath during his first inauguration. Like Coates, she experiences such incidents as a form of violence that throw her back upon herself, upon the resources of her blackness, her own body--her very identity, the nature of the self turned into a painful question. As Rankine remarks, near the end of the book, “the worse injury is feeling you don't belong so much/ to you.”

When this book is good, it is very good indeed. However, one of its seven sections—Part VI, occupying almost one-third of the book—is inferior to the rest. It is composed primarily of multi-media pieces written for particular occasions, which--although relevant and intermittently affecting—lack the poetic and narrative concentration of the rest. My advice: read the book straight through once, skipping Part VI, then go back and read VI, and read the whole book again.

But however you read this book, read it. And I am sure that, if you love Coates' Between the World and Me as much as I do, you will like this book very much.

Here is just one of the many incidents Rankine relates:

A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He's okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger's arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. Yes, and you want it to stop, you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.

The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers. ...more

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Dec 12, 2014 Roxane rated it it was amazing

This book is necessary and timely. It was timely fifty years ago. I pray it is not timely fifty years from now. Rankine takes on the realities of race in America with elegance but also rage/resignation... maybe we call it rageignation.

Outstanding book.

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Jan 28, 2015 s.penkevich rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: Everyone

Shelves: racism, americana, creative_non-fiction, important

**Update (4/6/16)** Tonight I had the privilege to attend a reading and discussion with Claudia Rankine here in Holland. It was a real treat. Especially powerful was seeing the visual elements of her book brought to life on the screen, with the video (made by her husband John Lucas), the music all mingling with her words to create an intensely powerful and emotive display. Rankine is a pure joy to hear read and speak, full of wit and humor and a reminder to us all that we all have the responsibi ...more

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Dec 28, 2014 Rowena rated it really liked it

Shelves: african-american, poetry

This was quite an emotional read for me, the instances of racial aggressions that were illustrated in this book being unfortunately all too familiar. The thing is, most people who commit these microaggressions don't realize they are making them yet they have an accumulated effect on the psyche. I hope this book will help people become more empathic to the plight of others. The question, "How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another?" is so apt, especially for those o ...more

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Mar 01, 2015 Brown Girl Reading rated it really liked it

This is a poignant powerful work of art. It's more than a book. The sections study different incidents in American culture and also includes a bit about France (black, blanc beurre). (That part surprised me.) Rankine does a brilliant job taking an in-depth look at life being black. She says the things that we have all said and describes situations we have all been in. In the light of the horrors that are finally coming out in the US concerning the police and its poor treatment of Black Americans ...more

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Jan 29, 2017 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: recs, poetry, 2017

A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. It’s rare to come across art, least of all poetry, that so obviously will endure the passing of time and be considered over and over, by many.

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Mar 03, 2015 Julie Christine rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-2015, social-political-commentary, best-of-2015, poetry

Look at the cover. A hoodie. The iconic image of American fear. Urban danger. Gang-bangers. A seventeen-year-old boy in Miami Gardens, FL.

The shooting death of an unarmed black man

The shooting death of an unarmed black man

The shooting death of an unarmed black man

Let Me Google That For You

Trayvon Martin
Michael Brown
Walter Scott
Ezell Ford

The hoodie on the cover is empty. Claudia Rankine fills it with experiences. The experiences of Americans whose color has rendered them invisible to the many w ...more

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Dec 13, 2014 Debbie "DJ" rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, non-fiction, poetry, cultural, political

Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of the written word. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. I saw the world through her eyes, a profound experience.

I loved this small piece of prose, "feeling most colored when thrown against a sharp white background." As a huge Serena Williams fan, I read with rapt attention to the expose' on Serena's plunge against that sharp white background. I felt a sense of rage that has always been there, burning. For Serena has ...more

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Jun 08, 2020 Jennifer ~ TarHeelReader rated it it was amazing

Shelves: diverse-spines-reading-challenge, audios

Listened as part of the Diverse Spines Reading Challenge. It’s a quick listen at 1.5 hours. Short on words, but every one counts and rings with purpose. I highly recommend the audio version.

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Apr 15, 2017 Whitney Atkinson rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry, read-in-2017

4.5 stars

I read about 40 pages of this back in September for Diverseathon, but for some reason, I really couldn't get into it then. Maybe it was that I should've have forced myself to read it in such a quick amount of time, because this story definitely warrants taking your time and digesting what it's trying to say. I continually put this off after that, citing that I was bored and didn't want to continue reading if it was going to be something painstaking.

However, I brought this book home with ...more

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Jul 11, 2020 Jenna rated it really liked it

Shelves: wake-up, essays, race, non-fiction

"Where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body?"

When I downloaded this book, I thought it was a book of poetry. It's not. It's a book of musings, meditations. Kinda like journal entries, kinda like essays. The author includes some brilliant artwork that fits in nicely with her words.

Even though I discovered it's not poetry and initially didn't like that it's written in the second person, I decided to read it anyway based on the blurb here on Goodreads. For "Where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body?"

When I downloaded this book, I thought it was a book of poetry. It's not. It's a book of musings, meditations. Kinda like journal entries, kinda like essays. The author includes some brilliant artwork that fits in nicely with her words.

Even though I discovered it's not poetry and initially didn't like that it's written in the second person, I decided to read it anyway based on the blurb here on Goodreads. For one thing, I strive to be more aware of the things I think and say which might be racist. It's helpful for me to hear of instances of micro-aggressions so that I can check myself and the words that come out of my mouth that would cause pain to someone else.

Claudia Rankine writes openly and achingly on her experiences as a Black woman in the United States. From relating micro-agressions she is often on the receiving end of, she also looks at how others, such as Serena Williams, are treated with hatred, disrespect, and prejudice.

Ms. Rankine notes the reason she writes in the second person: "Sometimes “I” is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it."

She relates how it feels to be judged and hated because of the colour of her skin. To not even feel her body belongs to her because it is always up for judgment and criticism. As she says, "The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much to you"

This is a quick read but one that will stay with me. We white people have no clue how it feels to be treated the way people of color are. We will never know the pain of being judged and hated over a tiny layer of skin, over how much melanin is in that layer that is only a millimeter thick. For my American friends, that's about the thickness --or thinness-- of a credit card.

I am reminded of a video I saw a while back and again the other day. It's only 45 seconds long but powerful. I encourage every white person reading this to watch. Please click here

The only reason I'm giving this 4 stars instead of 5 was because I didn't enjoy reading the included scripts for situational videos Claudine and her husband created. I found them more gratifying to watch than read. Still, this is an important book and one I'm glad I read.

You can watch Claudine and John Lucas' videos by clicking here and selecting 'situations'. ...more

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Feb 01, 2016 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read2016, poetry, creative-non-fiction, biography-memoir

Claudia Rankine zeros in on the microaggressions experienced by non-white people, particularly black females, in the United States.

These kinds of books basically make me feel:

Possibly the most memorable essay in here examines Serena Williams and her experiences in tennis - how she is portrayed, how she is treated on the court, her reactions and how those in turn are portrayed.

Also memorable to me are the little tidbits from Rankine's experience, such as people complaining to her about what they ...more

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Jul 27, 2017 Thomas rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry, nonfiction

A piercing and perceptive book of poetry about being black in America. With rightful anger and sadness Claudia Rankine details the racism she has experienced in the United States, as well as the racism that surrounds popular black people in the media like Serena Williams, Barack Obama, and Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. As Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow , we like to think that we live in a colorblind society, when in reality that false belief just blinds us to the way ...more

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Sep 23, 2014 Dc rated it it was amazing

claudia rankine is oxygen to a world under water.

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May 25, 2015 Jake Goretzki rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2015

Clearly - from the blurb and the plaudits - this is an 'important work' - and my failure to 'get it' is a failure to police my mind (or something). Ominously, it got rave reviews from Hilton Als - whose recent memoir gave me similar migraines.

I did find moments of lucidity (on Serena Williams; on everyday racism; on Zidane). But for the most part, I found this terribly self-indulgent, formless adolescent gloop that felt like listening to a cultural studies student breathlessly talking about las ...more

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Jan 20, 2015 Trish rated it it was amazing

Shelves: art, film, history, literature, nonfiction, america, essays, politics, poetry, race

Race is something we Americans still have not gotten right. Rankine’s small book of essays tells us the myriad ways we consistently misinterpret others’ motives, actions, language. She writes in second person: "you." It is agonizing to display our flayed skin to the salt of another day. You take to wearing sunglasses inside.

I call these essays while Holly Bass in the NYTimes calls them poems. They are fragments, scripts or screenplays for video or film, shards of thought, sharp and able to pierc Race is something we Americans still have not gotten right. Rankine’s small book of essays tells us the myriad ways we consistently misinterpret others’ motives, actions, language. She writes in second person: "you." It is agonizing to display our flayed skin to the salt of another day. You take to wearing sunglasses inside.

I call these essays while Holly Bass in the NYTimes calls them poems. They are fragments, scripts or screenplays for video or film, shards of thought, sharp and able to pierce one with remembered pain. Bass's review (12.24.14) explains the floating and disembodied hoodie on the cover, black against a field of white: an art installation made in 1993 by David Hammons, long before Trayvon Martin died--before he was even born. Rankine shares a line attributed to Zora Neale Hurston: "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background."

Rankine talks of tennis, of Serena and Venus, of foot faults and bad calls. I didn’t know these things: I don’t watch tennis. But foot faults and bad calls are happening on our streets, not within the civilized constraints of a rule-bound tennis game. These I do watch. The agony of the small daily slights crescendo, collapse, avalanche when the police become involved. No wonder people run away from police, our ‘guardians’. We have all learned something these many years and it is not that police are guardians.

Overhead in the conference room: “being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation.” Yes, it is a cultural difference. They got that right. But that’s all: Nothing more sinister or insoluble. And since we know that America is all about cultural differences, this should be something to celebrate. Or profit from.

My mind slides to Obama, and how I don’t think of him as black anymore. Have whites co-opted him? Or is it because black and white are not as different as we were expecting? That our differences really are only skin deep. I worry that we expected Obama to “fix the race problem.” How can he fix the thousand interactions we have every day between us? By denying any differences? Have we learned nothing, nor made any progress at all? Our divisions may have been exacerbated. Tell me it ain’t so.

Rankine’s essays reference the language of video, of film. My mind skims her short paragraphs and the indignities, the small and the large slights blossom. Together we imagine film, great films, films everyone watches and re-watches, praising the actorly restraint and real-life quality of the slurs...something European in slowness and length…that shows us, white and black and yellow and red…what we say, what we think, what we do…to each other. Catching those moments of misinterpretation, or interpretation, waking up to ourselves—this is what great film does.

There is so much work to be done, art to make, change to happen! The urgency weighs on me. "The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers": James Baldwin and Fyodor Dostoyevsky agree on definition. The ingredients of art are all around us, fat and ripe and ready to be harvested. There is so much art to be made, so many lessons to learn. Hurry!

Citizen was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry. Claudia Rankine is a poet.
...more

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Jan 22, 2017 Robyn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: to-read-fiction, 2017

"Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue."

Necessa ...more

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Jan 06, 2015 Book Riot Community added it

Shelves: non-fiction

After reading Citizen, it’s hard not to hear Rankine’s voice as I ride the subway, walk around NYC, or even pick up other books. What did he say? What did she just do? We live in a culture as full of microaggressions as breaking new headlines, and Citizen brings it home. Whether Rankine is talking about tennis or going out to dinner, or spinning words until you’re not sure which direction you’re facing, there is strength, anger, and a call for white readers like myself to see what’s in front of ...more

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Jan 18, 2017 Tori (InToriLex) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, diverse-reads, poetry, african-american-experience

Find this and other Reviews at In Tori Lex

This book is a beautiful reflection at how racist microaggressions that most minority's face mentally chip away at the people who experience them. It's documents the weight of excusing racists slights and ignoring views in attempts to just exist as human.The book navigates between short poems and powerful vignettes. One of the most memorable being the disconcerting feeling and shame that happens when your friend says something to you that is racist, and Find this and other Reviews at In Tori Lex

This book is a beautiful reflection at how racist microaggressions that most minority's face mentally chip away at the people who experience them. It's documents the weight of excusing racists slights and ignoring views in attempts to just exist as human.The book navigates between short poems and powerful vignettes. One of the most memorable being the disconcerting feeling and shame that happens when your friend says something to you that is racist, and it markedly changes how you feel about that person, no matter how many times they explain it's a joke.

"...a friend once told you there exists the medical term- John Henryism- for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure."

The resounding truth I read in these poems, and the sigh of relief I felt reading came because I try very hard to look past small acts of racism. But it felt great to read that it's not normal to play by rules that have addendum's just for you, and meekly never complain. Claudia Rankin explains the racism that Serena Williams has experienced and how it is often overlooked even as she completely dominates her sport. Yesterday a sport's commentator in reference to Venus Williams said "You see Venus move in and put the gorilla effect on. Charging." This illustrates how black athletes often deal with racism, and cast it aside as apart of the game, but that cost paid is never acknowledged.

"because white men can't
police their imagination
black people are dying"

This poetry collection includes mixed media. It highlights pictures, art installations and even refers to YouTube videos. I enjoyed it because the inclusion of modern illustrations and references made it a contemporary reflection for us all. The book also describes situations, which are videos produced on her website. I won't review the videos but I found context for what was described with out them. I would recommend this book to everyone, as a solid way to begin to understand how it feels to exist as an other in our society. ...more

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Mar 27, 2015 Lauren rated it it was amazing

Shelves: social-justice-commentary, poetry, best-of-2016

In line at the drugstore it's finally your turn, and then it's not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised.

Oh my God, I didn't see you.

You must be in a hurry, you offer.

No, no, no, I really didn't see you.

--

Citizen lead me to several thoughts: on the surface, I want to read all of Claudia Rankine's work, AND I didn't realize that prose poetry was such a thing (how did I miss this?) and ...more

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Jan 16, 2015 Ellie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry, 2015gpchallenge, race, favorites, art-artists, 2015indchallenge

Citizen: An American Lyric is a powerful work, the most recent by poet Claudia Rankine. It is cry about racism, prose and poetry with the line between the two often blurred or non-existent. It is "political poetry" at its best, most moving, uncomfortable for me as a white woman but searing and with a beauty in the language that conveys the ugliness, the horror in much of what it tells.

The book sent me to Youtube to hear Rankine reading, Rankine interviewed.

Rankine is a major force, a brilliant p ...more

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Apr 05, 2016 Dave Schaafsma rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry, race, non-fiction, collage-pastiche-multigenre

I repeat what Bill Kerwin reminded me of in his review of this book: At a Trump rally, there is a woman sitting behind him reading a book while he speaks. Citizen: An American Lyric is the book she was reading. Trump is of course unapologetically and infamously racist against various races (and religions, women, and so on), so the woman behind Trump uses the opportunity to read this anti-racist book, knowing it will get national coverage; we see the title, we check it out: Powerful political com I repeat what Bill Kerwin reminded me of in his review of this book: At a Trump rally, there is a woman sitting behind him reading a book while he speaks. Citizen: An American Lyric is the book she was reading. Trump is of course unapologetically and infamously racist against various races (and religions, women, and so on), so the woman behind Trump uses the opportunity to read this anti-racist book, knowing it will get national coverage; we see the title, we check it out: Powerful political commentary. Political performance art.

I have not been reading many books in the past couple years specifically just about race. I read the news and political commentary every day and I live in the current murder capitol of the world, Chicago, one of the cities where young black men have been gunned down on the street by the police. So I without question read about racism and observe it every day. I teach in urban Chicago, am regularly in the Chicago Public Schools. And so on.

I have twice in the past six months read National Book Award winner Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I found to be powerful and eloquent on the subject of race, and the Goodreads algorithm suggested I check out this "related" text, and reminded me that this book, Citizen, is a National Book award finalist from the previous year, nominated for both the National Book Circle Award in poetry AND criticism. When I saw that, I ordered it right away. I am a sucker for multi-genre and multi-media texts, of which this is surely one.

I didn't love the execution of it quite as much as the conception, but it did like it, and I read it twice in the past three days. I liked it better the second time, the more I paid attention to the movement in it. Coates's book is sort of conventional in comparison, a memoir, a letter to his fifteen year old son about growing up as a black body in the old U. S. of A. Citizen is at once a meditation on that same topic and also announces itself as an "American lyric" that some have categorized as poetry, though some of it is prose; at least a third of it are scripts written for various video collaborations with John Lucas, who also provides some of the images for the book, and who designed it.

As "lyrical" it isn't meant to be coherent. It's not primarily an argumentative essay; rather, it's meant to be evocative, enigmatic, at turns enraged, but more often thoughtful. Much if it is cultural commentary, or cultural criticism, such as an essay about Serena Williams that takes up a good part of it. I think of the whole of the book as lyrical essay. The last third is the weakest section, the video pieces; it feels less integrated into the whole than the rest, feels sort of tacked on to me. My mind wandered a bit in that section.

The whole feels like a kind of mediation on citizenship, make of that meditation what you will, because she is not writing James Baldwin essays or Coates memoir. She is making with Lucas bricolage, or pastiche. Some of it is just small observations of every day racism, the everydayness of
it that we participate in and may not quite acknowledge. I recommend your checking it out. As I said, I liked the form of it more than the actual writing itself. But the writing itself can still be lovely in places and provocative throughout. ...more

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Oct 11, 2019 Trudie rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry, read-harder-2019

I think this is probably excellent and I enjoyed most of it but my caveat needs to be I am inept at appreciating poetry. I nearly always would rather spend time with a novel. I can only point feebly at bits I liked without having the language to say why. Predictably, my finger hovers over sections that are more like prose than poetry ( that bit on Serena was a highlight).
Thus, I must nod in deference to other reviewers for explaining what makes this one such an acclaimed poetry collection, for ...more

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Mar 22, 2017 Lee Klein rated it really liked it

Rivetingly worth it for the Serena Williams section and the slices of life in the first half that so effectively/efficiently dramatize overt and less obvious instances of racism. I didn't engage to the same degree with the deeper-POV parts (prose poems) or the situation video texts toward the end I suppose because the indirect, abstracted approaches didn't shake me as much (charge me, more so; make me feel more alert, as though reading a thriller) and maybe felt more like they were being used, f ...more

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Oct 13, 2014 Justin rated it it was amazing

I'll just say it. Most important poetry book of the year. Brilliant, deeply troubling, beautiful.

It better dang well win the National Book Award. ...more

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Feb 28, 2018 Gabriella rated it liked it

Shelves: 2018-reads, bhm-18-challenge, books-for-school, poetry-collections

I feel like Citizen is one of those books everyone’s read in some portion. By my middling review, I definitely don’t mean to take away anything from Claudia Rankine’s work—I know it made many people more cognizant about the racial issues in this country, and that’s always a great thing—but four years later, it felt a bit off-base for me.

This is another book for my Beyonce/Solange/Jay-Z class, which has now moved on to the latter artists. We’re reading this for our A Seat at the Table unit, whic I feel like Citizen is one of those books everyone’s read in some portion. By my middling review, I definitely don’t mean to take away anything from Claudia Rankine’s work—I know it made many people more cognizant about the racial issues in this country, and that’s always a great thing—but four years later, it felt a bit off-base for me.

This is another book for my Beyonce/Solange/Jay-Z class, which has now moved on to the latter artists. We’re reading this for our A Seat at the Table unit, which adds to my disappointment with this book, because I really loved the album! Back in 2016, Solange listed Citizen as one of the inspirations for her album, namely due to Rankine’s straightforward descriptions of our nation’s racial grievances.

In 160 pages of essays(?), cultural criticism, and poetry, Citizen explores the gradient of white people who “cannot police their imagination,” and how their prejudice poses grave consequences for black Americans. While this is a novel, admirable feat, it seemed a bit selfish to equate police brutality and a real estate agent assuming you couldn’t pay for a house you wanted. To Solange’s point, I found the most clarity in Rankine’s personal accounts of microaggressions she’s experienced, and not in the darker occurrences she describes (such as the deaths of Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson.)

There’s nothing wrong with Rankine sharing her experiences, but it seemed kind of cheap to share them in line with the story scripts, which detailed the deaths and abuse black people have endured at the hands of the state. Some of the scripts (Katrina, World Cup) seemed really imaginative, but most felt a bit too removed to convey the real emotions connected to state terror. Tonally, it almost seemed like she was writing two different books—one about microaggressions, and one about black trauma.

I’m really appreciative of this work, but just wish the sections with “more serious” issues were as lived-in and intimately observed as her complaints about not getting a subway seat. Citizen is an important, powerful, political work of art, but just not the one for me. ...more

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Dec 09, 2014 Karen Witzler rated it it was amazing

Shelves: poetry, 1000-mustich

Magnificent. Read it all in one flow. Claudia Rankine gives us an act of creativity and illumination that combats the mirror world of unseeing and unseen-ness that is imprinted onto the American psyche.I can't fix it or even root it out of myself but Rankine gives me, a white reader, (are there other readers - the mirror keeps reflecting...), a moment when I can walk through the glass. And this is why I read books.

...more

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Jun 19, 2015 Kelly added it

Shelves: non-fiction, read-in-2015

A damn hard read but a damn necessary one.

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Jan 21, 2015 Ron Charles rated it really liked it

Shelves: poetry

Had the pleasure of talking to Claudine Rankine's editor about this remarkable book:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/s...
...more

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Feb 19, 2021 Claude's Bookzone rated it it was amazing

Well that was incredibly powerful.

I strongly recommend reading as opposed to listening. I started with the audiobook but found I needed to see the words. To really SEE them. I could study phrases and reflect, and take the time to feel. There are also some thought provoking visual elements too. I also suggest reading this in a quiet place and in a quiet time, if you know what I mean. A time when you are ready to commit to the experience and the range of emotions you will feel. This book is impor ...more

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Read Women: Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine	21	58	Jul 25, 2019 06:45AM
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About Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine

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Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City.

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 20 ...more