The New York Times Book Review - Holly Bass
The challenge of making racism relevant, or even evident, to those who do not bear the brunt of its ill effects is tricky. Rankine brilliantly pushes poetry's forms to disarm readers and circumvent our carefully constructed defense mechanisms against the hint of possibly being racist ourselves…The writing zigs and zags effortlessly between prose poems, images and essays. This is the poet as conceptual artist, in full mastery of her craft…it's like viewing an experimental film or live performance. One is left with a mix of emotions that linger and wend themselves into the subconscious.
Publishers Weekly
★ 08/18/2014
In this trenchant new work about racism in the 21st century, Rankine, recently appointed chancellor of the American Academy of Poets and winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, extends the innovative formal techniques and painfully clear-sighted vision she established in her landmark Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Accounts of racially charged interactions, insidious and flagrant, transpiring in private and in the public eye, distill the immediate emotional intensity of individual experience with tremendous precision while allowing ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and exhaustion to remain in all their fraught complexity. Combining poetry, essay, and images from media and contemporary art, Rankine’s poetics capture the urgency of her subject matter. Indeed, much of the book focuses on language: sound bites from cultural commentators; the words of acquaintances, colleagues, and friends; responses and moments of silence; what it means to address and be addressed; and what it means when one’s only recourse is to sigh. “A body translates its you—/ you there, hey you,” she writes, “The worst hurt is feeling you don’t belong so much/ to you.” Once again Rankine inspires sympathy and outrage, but most of all a will to take a deep look at ourselves and our society. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
[Citizen] is an especially vital book for this moment in time. . . . The realization at the end of this book sits heavily upon the heart: 'This is how you are a citizen,' Rankine writes. 'Come on. Let it go. Move on.' As Rankine's brilliant, disabusing work, always aware of its ironies, reminds us, 'moving on' is not synonymous with 'leaving behind.'” —The New Yorker
“Citizen is audacious in form. But what is perhaps especially striking about the book is that it has achieved something that eludes much modern poetry: urgency.” —The New York Times
“So groundbreaking is Rankine's work that it's almost impossible to describe; suffice it to say that this is a poem that reads like an essay (or the other way around) - a piece of writing that invents a new form for itself, incorporating pictures, slogans, social commentary and the most piercing and affecting revelations to evoke the intersection of inner and outer life.” —Los Angeles Times
“Rankine brilliantly pushes poetry's forms to disarm readers and circumvent our carefully constructed defense mechanisms against the hint of possibly being racist ourselves. . . . Citizen throws a Molotov cocktail at the notion that reduction of injustice is the same as freedom.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Moving, stunning, and formally innovative-in short, a masterwork.” —Salon
“Part protest lyric, part art book, Citizen is a dazzling expression of the painful double consciousness of black life in America.” —The Washington Post
“The book of the year is Claudia Rankine's Citizen. It would have been the book of any year.... Citizen asks us to change the way we look; we have to believe that that might lead to changing the way we live.” —The New Yorker’s Page-Turner
“[Citizen] is one of the best books I've ever wanted not to read. . . . Its genius . . . resides in that capacity to make so many different versions of American life proper to itself, to instruct us in the depth and variety of our participation in a narrative of race that we recount and reinstate, even when we speak as though it weren't there.” —Slate
“Marrying prose, poetry, and the visual image, Citizen investigates the ways in which racism pervades daily American social and cultural life, rendering certain of its citizens politically invisible. Rankine's formally inventive book challenges our notion that citizenship is only a legal designation that the state determines by expanding that definition to include a larger understanding of civic belonging and identity, built out of cross-racial empathy, communal responsibility, and a deeply shared commitment to equality.” —National Book Award Judges’ Citation
“Citizen is an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap. . . . This work is careful, loving, restorative witness is itself an act of resistance, a proof of endurance.” —Bookforum
“Accounts of racially charged interactions, insidious and flagrant, transpiring in private and in the public eye, distill the immediate emotional intensity of individual experience with tremendous precision while allowing ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and exhaustion to remain in all their fraught complexity. . . . Once again Rankine inspires sympathy and outrage, but most of all a will to take a deep look at ourselves and our society.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A prism of personal perspectives illuminates [Rankine's] meditations on race. . . . Powerful.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. Its various realities—'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life—are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. Citizen is Rankine's Spoon River Anthology, an epic as large and frightening and beautiful as the country and various emotional states that produced it.” —Hilton Als
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"Combining poetry, essay, and images from media and contemporary art, Rankine's poetics capture the urgency of her subject matter." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Library Journal - Audio
10/01/2015
Academy of American Poets chancellor Rankine (poetry, Pomona Coll., Don't Let Me Be Lonely) explores daily acts of racism in this poetic essay. Moving at a pace that varies greatly throughout the work, small "you see" or "you hear" statements provide examples of racist remarks that often go unchallenged in society, but Rankine spends time examining the thoughts (in both her own words and those of the person speaking) and her possible reactions that did not come forth in the moment. This is a work that benefits from being listened to several times to appreciate fully the nuanced wording and references. Narrator Allyson Johnson reads the prose with a lilting voice during some parts and a harsh, angry tone during others to match the situation. VERDICT Sometimes shocking, sometimes disturbing, but always thoughtful, this work is for fans of Rankine and modern poetry, those who care for societal and racial concerns, and those who want to help change negative views on race.—Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI
Library Journal
11/01/2014
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award in poetry, this follow up to Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric brings together essays, images, and poems on the stress of citizenship in a deeply racist country.
OCTOBER 2015 - AudioFile
Narrating this montage of reportage and poetic essays, Allyson Johnson captures every ounce of the pathos and shock contained in the stories of the racial injustice suffered by black athletes such as Serena Williams and others. Johnson’s measured drama and impassioned dialogue interpretations rivet the listener’s attention and awaken sensitivity to the racism that still exists in both public and private arenas. Her memorable performance provides auditory texture and impact for the audiobook. Many of the vignettes describe shocking injustices—malicious oversights and blatantly wrong athletic officiating that can only be described as crimes of fear and hate. The achievement of this audio is how it allows these stories and the author’s powerful perspective to compel more empathy and vigilance about this lingering problem in America. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2014-07-30
A prism of personal perspectives illuminates a poet's meditations on race.Like a previous volume, Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Rankine (English/Pomona Coll.) subtitles this book An American Lyric, which serves as an attempt to categorize the unclassifiable. Some of this might look like poetry, but more often there are short anecdotes or observations, pieces of visual art and longer selections credited as "Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas." Yet the focus throughout is on how it feels and what it means to be black in America. It builds from an accretion of slights (being invisible, ignored or called by the name of a black colleague) and builds toward the killing of Trayvon Martin and the video-gone-viral beating of Rodney King. "A similar accumulation and release drove many Americans to respond to the Rodney King beating," she writes. "Before it happened, it had happened and happened." Rankine is particularly insightful about Serena Williams, often criticized for displays of anger that the author justifies as responses to racism, conscious or not. "For Serena," she writes, "the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. Every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you." The author's anger is cathartic, for her and perhaps for readers, though she shows how it can be strategic as well: She refers to an artist's "wryly suggesting black people's anger is marketable," while proposing that "on the bridge between this sellable anger and ‘the artist' resides, at times, an actual anger." Within what are often very short pieces or sections, with lots of white space on the page, Rankine more effectively sustains a feeling and establishes a state of being than advances an argument. At times, she can be both provocative and puzzling—e.g., "It is the White Man who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates." Frequently powerful, occasionally opaque.
