| Title | Citizen: An American Lyric |
| Language | English |
| Published | October 7, 2014 |
| Genre | Poetry |
| File Format | |
| Number of Pages | 166 |
| Rating | Click to rate this post! [Total: 1 Average: 5] |
Citizen: An American Lyric is a 2014 poem by the American poet Claudia Rankine. Citizen extends the conventions of traditional lyrical poetry by interweaving various forms of text and media in a collective portrait of race relations in the United States. The book was ranked as a New York Times bestseller in 2015 and won several awards, including the 2014 National Book Critics of Poetry Award, the 2015 NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work in Poetry, and the 2015 Forward Award for Best Poetry Collection.
In her critique of racism and visibility, Rankine details the day-to-day microaggressions that African Americans face discusses controversial incidents such as the backlash against tennis player Serena Williams, and asks about the ramifications of the shooting of Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. She mixes her writing with images from various paintings, drawings, sculptures, and other digital media to “make the black experience visible.
Table of Contents
Book Summary
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 the increasing racial assaults in ongoing encounters in everyday life in the 21st century and in the media. Some of these encounters are mild, they seem to be the language, and others are intentional offenses in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams, and on the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, in television everywhere. , all the time. Cumulative stresses affect a person’s ability to speak, act, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essays, images, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary society, often called “post-race.
Book Review
Rankine’s work is so innovative that it is almost impossible to describe; suffice it to say that this is a poem that is read as an essay (or the other way around): writing that invents a new form for itself, that incorporates images, slogans, social comments, and the most penetrating and shocking revelations to evoke The intersection of inner and outer life.
About The Author Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including “Citizen: An American Lyric” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely”; two plays including “The White Card,” which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and “Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue”; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including “The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.” In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Citizen: An American Lyric (excerpt)
Due to her elite status worth a year’s worth of travel, she has already settled into her window seat at United Airlines when the girl and her mother arrive in line with her. The girl, looking at you, says to her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what she expected. The mother’s response is barely audible, I see, she says. I will sit in the middle.
Citizen: An American Lyric PDF
