‘A New Way of Writing About Race’

[Beverly]

Told mostly through a series of “micro-aggressions” (the term coined by Harvard professor Chester Pierce in 1970 to describe unconscious insults nonblack Americans aim at black people), Citizen is a circuitous and intimate descent into the poet’s past in order to examine race in America. Some of the incidents happen to the poet, some are reports from friends. Rankine writes almost exclusively in the second-person present, a tense that implicates as it includes, endowing events with a sense of immediacy and urgency.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...

[Anastasia Kinderman]

Thanks for the link, Beverly. I'll have to check this book out.

[A.]

I just checked out the sample chapter offered as a preview on Amazon of Citizen…powerful stuff.