From the beginning of the book, the reader is involved in the text through Rankine’s use of the second-person “you,” making the personal universal: “You are twelve attending Sts. But that is what makes Rankine’s work beautiful, tragic, profound: in describing African American experience, Rankine strives not to “make it new” (as the modernists would have it), but to make it legible - to articulate the contradictory state of invisibility and hypervisibility, of aggressions and microaggressions, that black citizens endure daily in a society that continues to position them as “other.” In this sense Rankine treads familiar territory (after all, one can hardly claim that racial injustice is a new phenomenon in the US) in an unfamiliar way, letting form reflect content such that a reader can feel the psychological toll of black citizenship in this country, a country built upon the historical exploitation of black bodies.Ĭitizen is structured as a collection of lived experiences - whether the author’s, or those of her friends or fellow black Americans, is unclear and perhaps unimportant - interspersed with postcolonial theory, excerpts from the news and pop culture, and artwork. The subject matter in Claudia Rankine’s hybrid prose-poetry book Citizen is nothing new. ON CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC BY CLAUDIA RANKINE 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.Ĭitizen 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.Back to Issue Twelve. 'And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.' 'Everywhere were flashes, a siren sounding and a stretched-out roar. WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR POETRY 2015 WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY 2015 WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2015

Citizen an american lyric