Citizen
* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry * * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award *
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . .
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 intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
160 pages
English edition · First published 2014 by Graywolf Press · ISBN 9781555973483
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Ratings and reviews
The moments expressed in this book left me utterly heartbroken, and asking “who the f- says/thinks that?!?” while tears streamed down my face from start to finish. This book is beautifully written, and perfectly unforgiving. Art like this is necessary, especially considering what is happening in the United States right now. Art like this is powerful. Art like this gives people the will and motivation to demand change and to create it. Let us remember that there is no superior skin colour or race; we are all people trying to get by one day at a time, the least we can do is make it easier on one another. Thank you Rankine for writing this incredible difficult masterpiece. Thank for bringing attention to the fact we are not living in a post racial world, as much as we like to tell ourselves we are.
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