Review by New York Times Review
in light of the national demonstrations over the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, it's tempting to describe "Citizen," Claudia Rankine's latest volume of poetry, as "timely." Even the cover image of a floating hoodie, its sleeves and torso cut away, seems timely. Any American viewing it would immediately recall a certain black teenager who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer in February 2012. But this work, by the artist David Hammons, was created in 1993 - well before Trayvon Martin was even born. And this seems to be part of Rankine's conceit: What passes as news for some (white) readers is simply quotidian lived experience for (black) others. The challenge of making racism relevant, or even evident, to those who do not bear the brunt of its ill effects is tricky. Rankine brilliantly pushes poetry's forms to disarm readers and circumvent our carefully constructed defense mechanisms against the hint of possibly being racist ourselves. To wit, in many of her pieces, it's easy to presume the "you" is always black and the "she" or "he" is always white, but within a few pages Rankine begins muddying the personas and pronouns in a way that forces us to work a little harder. This technique reaches its high point in a breathless, unpunctuated conclusion to her lament on the Jena Six, the group of black teenagers charged in Louisiana after the 2006 beating of a white student: "Boys will be boys being boys feeling their capacity heaving butting heads righting their wrongs in the violence of aggravated adolescence ... for the other boy for the other boys the fists the feet criminalized already are weapons already exploding the landscape and then the litigious hitting back is life imprisoned." As she did in her 2004 collection "Don't Let Me Be Lonely," Rankine again works with a form she calls "an American Lyric." The writing zigs and zags effortlessly between prose poems, images and essays. This is the poet as conceptual artist, in full mastery of her craft. And while the themes of this book could have been mined from any point in America's history, Rankine sets the whole collection resolutely in the present. Contemporary content and contemporary form mirror each other. Rankine has published four previous volumes of poetry in addition to writing plays, creating videos and editing several anthologies. Her multidisciplinary ethos colors every page of "Citizen." The book is divided into seven sections with no index or table of contents. Without titles to separate and ground them, her poetic texts and images function as fragments of memory, coming into sharp focus, then blurring. Cumulatively, it's like viewing an experimental film or live performance. One is left with a mix of emotions that linger and wend themselves into the subconscious. There is a lengthy essay on Serena Williams that beautifully unpacks the "angry black woman" motif in a way that could also be seen as timely. And there is a series of "scripts," some created in collaboration with the photographer John Lucas, that blend text and image to create a kind of revisionist remix of major media coverage of racialized incidents. In addition to touching on topics like Trayvon Martin and the Jena Six, Rankine also cites the British citizen Mark Duggan, whose 2011 death at the hands of the police prompted riots across London, and broader events like Hurricane Katrina and the 2006 World Cup. Most are dated, with some as recent as February and August 2014. The section closes with a tribute to Jordan Davis, the Florida teenager shot and killed in 2012 by a man who objected to his rap music, along with a companion piece captioned "February 15, 2014/The Justice System." Both pages are left blank, aptly expressing what Davis's parents and so many (black) Americans felt after the initial "loud music trial" verdict - a stunned silence. (Jurors couldn't agree on murder charges, leading to a mistrial, but the shooter was subsequently retried and convicted this fall.) There are also several evocative internal monologues that offer a kind of breathing space between the texts grounded in fact. "You sit down, you sigh. You stand up, you sigh. The sighing is a worrying exhale of an ache. You wouldn't call it an illness; still it is not the iteration of a free being. What else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind?" At best these monologues capture the liminal quality of being black and American - what Du Bois called double consciousness - though on occasion they lapse into slack tautology: "Do feelings lose their feeling if they speak to a lack of feeling?" Rankine has for the most part abandoned line breaks; she is like a painter abandoning representation in order to focus on canvas, color and light. In her world, enjambment, that poetic technique of allowing a sentence to run into the next line of poetry, often to create layered meanings, takes place between poems rather than between lines. An incident in a drugstore in which a man inadvertently cuts the line for the cashier because he did not see the narrator flows into a haunting meditation on Hurricane Katrina that ends with the following lines of dialogue: Call out to them. I don't see them. Call out anyway. Did you see their faces? The bulk of the book consists of lyric prose poems, in present tense and second person. A reasoned, measured tone marks these personal accounts of everyday racism, events enacted by what the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates calls "good people." Rankine creates an intentionally disorienting experience, one that mirrors the experience of racial micro-aggressions her subjects encounter. Race is both referenced and purposely effaced within the text. "The real estate woman, who didn't fathom she could have made an appointment to show her house to you, spends much of the walk-through telling your friend, repeatedly, how comfortable she feels around her. Neither you nor your friend bothers to ask who is making her feel uncomfortable." A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a professor at Pomona College, Rankine seems eager to indicate that her narrators belong to the cultured, well -educated set. These episodes take place at private school, on the way to therapy, in the cabin of a plane. These are the accomplished black professionals and academics whose lives are often spent in white circles, and often presumed to be free of the strictures of race. But Rankine wants us to know that no American citizen is ever really free of race and racism. The potential to say a racist thing or think a racist thought resides in all of us like an unearthed mine from a forgotten war. "The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. ... Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth?" As Rankine pointedly writes, "Just getting along shouldn't be an ambition." "Citizen" throws a Molotov cocktail at the notion that a reduction of injustice is the same as freedom. What's news for some (white) readers is simply lived experience for (black) others. HOLLY BASS is a poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work has been presented at the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 21, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Rankine, winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize and chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is playwright and essayist as well as poet, and all three forms are present in her second, galvanizing American Lyric, following Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004). In prose poems and poetic essays as sharp and stinging as a surprise slap to the face, Rankine matter-of-factly chronicles ordinary encounters poisoned by racism. Thoughtless and reflexive remarks and responses, such as a white therapist reacting with fear and aggression when a black client appears at her door. She also addresses, with fresh insights and precision, the adversities facing tennis star Serena Williams, presents a piece titled Frisk and Search, and offers deeply resonant tributes to those felled by racial violence, including Trayvon Martin. In poems of solitary reflection, despair, and conviction, the speaker considers the eloquence of sighs and rejects the directive, Let it go. Accompanied by evocative images, Rankine's arrestingly forthright, emotionally authentic, and artistically lithe inquiry induces us to question and protest every racial assault against our individual and collective humanity.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. In this trenchant new work about racism in the 21st century, Rankine, recently appointed chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, extends the innovative formal techniques and painfully clear-sighted vision she established in her landmark Don't Let Me Be Lonely. 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. Combining poetry, essay, and images from media and contemporary art, Rankine's poetics capture the urgency of her subject matter. Indeed, much of the book focuses on language: sound bites from cultural commentators; the words of acquaintances, colleagues, and friends; responses and moments of silence; what it means to address and be addressed; and what it means when one's only recourse is to sigh. "A body translates its you-/ you there, hey you,"¿ she writes, "The worst hurt is feeling you don't belong so much/ to you."¿ Once again Rankine inspires sympathy and outrage, but most of all a will to take a deep look at ourselves and our society. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Academy of American Poets chancellor Rankine (poetry, Pomona Coll., Don't Let Me Be Lonely) explores daily acts of racism in this poetic essay. Moving at a pace that varies greatly throughout the work, small "you see" or "you hear" statements provide examples of racist remarks that often go unchallenged in society, but Rankine spends time examining the thoughts (in both her own words and those of the person speaking) and her possible reactions that did not come forth in the moment. This is a work that benefits from being listened to several times to appreciate fully the nuanced wording and references. Narrator Allyson Johnson reads the prose with a lilting voice during some parts and a harsh, angry tone during others to match the situation. VERDICT Sometimes shocking, sometimes disturbing, but always thoughtful, this work is for fans of Rankine and modern poetry, those who care for societal and racial concerns, and those who want to help change negative views on race.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A prism of personal perspectives illuminates a poet's meditations on race.Like a previous volume, Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Rankine (English/Pomona Coll.) subtitles this book An American Lyric, which serves as an attempt to categorize the unclassifiable. Some of this might look like poetry, but more often there are short anecdotes or observations, pieces of visual art and longer selections credited as "Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas." Yet the focus throughout is on how it feels and what it means to be black in America. It builds from an accretion of slights (being invisible, ignored or called by the name of a black colleague) and builds toward the killing of Trayvon Martin and the video-gone-viral beating of Rodney King. "A similar accumulation and release drove many Americans to respond to the Rodney King beating," she writes. "Before it happened, it had happened and happened." Rankine is particularly insightful about Serena Williams, often criticized for displays of anger that the author justifies as responses to racism, conscious or not. "For Serena," she writes, "the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. Every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you." The author's anger is cathartic, for her and perhaps for readers, though she shows how it can be strategic as well: She refers to an artist's "wryly suggesting black people's anger is marketable," while proposing that "on the bridge between this sellable anger and the artist' resides, at times, an actual anger." Within what are often very short pieces or sections, with lots of white space on the page, Rankine more effectively sustains a feeling and establishes a state of being than advances an argument. At times, she can be both provocative and puzzlinge.g., "It is the White Man who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates." Frequently powerful, occasionally opaque. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
