Citizen
An American Lyric
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4.6 • 10 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR POETRY
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY
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 an ostensibly "post-race" society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
