You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary movement, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating sounds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition. --from back cover
"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, …
You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary movement, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating sounds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition. --from back cover
"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." -- from publisher's description.
Coming into this from Don't Let Me Be Lonely, I was a little disappointed, but it's still quiet good.
It is a little strange reading this a decade after it came out, the same conversations it's embedded in continuing to loop today, nothing really seeming to improve. It's easy to imagine extending this book with the handful of new instances of racism that happened to become news cycles, and ending it the same way. Depressing, but I think partially that cyclic nature is what the book is about.
This was not what I expected! I’m not much for poetry, but I’ve been trying to challenge myself by including it in what I read in the morning.
This has a lot of what I guess I’d call prose poems and some mixed media. I found it way more accessible than some of the other poetry I’ve read because of that.
There’s still plenty that I was not understanding, but that’s fine. It’s one that I think I might get my own copy of (rather than the library’s) and reread, markup.
There isn't very much I can say as far as a review of this slim, poetic, and devastating book. This is required reading for all Americans and perhaps some proof, not only that Claudia Rankine is a National Treasure, but that we are entering a period of cultural awakening that might actually hold.
Pins you down with moments of shocked silence at routine barely remarked violence. Strongest in her concrete second-person observations on invisibility and revealed inequity.
