Citizen

An American Lyric

by Claudia Rankine

Paperback, 160 pages

English language

Published Oct. 7, 2014 by Graywolf Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-55597-690-3
OCLC Number:: 870663869

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.

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.

7 editions

Wesley Aptekar-Cassels reviewed Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Citizen: An American Lyric

3 stars

Content warning CW: discussion of racism

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.

Radio reviewed Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Review of 'Citizen' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

How to care for the injured body,

the kind of body that can’t hold
the content it is living?

And where is the safest place when that place
must be someplace other than in the body?

anaulin reviewed Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Review of 'Citizen' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Brief notes: anaulin.org/blog/book-notes-citizen/

Erin reviewed Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Review of 'Citizen' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

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.

Adrián Astur Álvarez reviewed Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Review of 'Citizen' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

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.

loppear reviewed Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Review of 'Citizen' on Goodreads

4 stars

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.