This was beautifully written, and it was very eye-opening.
James Mustich
Winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry (in a sign of the book’s multivalent singularity, it was also a finalist in the Criticism category), Claudia Rankine’s remarkable book is about being a citizen in an uncivil union, a relationship that renders one’s figure in the world alternatively ominous and invisible. Something like a gallery, Citizen is unconventional in form as well as force: Photographic images and paintings are juxtaposed with text, and a section of the volume presents scripts for “situation videos.” Created with John Lucas, these are collage-like constructions of quotations and meditations on injustice, discrimination, and violence as reflected in specific instances, including Hurricane Katrina, the killings of Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson, the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of British authorities, and the policy of stop-and-frisk adopted by urban police forces. In the pages of Citizen, Rankine holds fast to what she’s seen, brings close what others have felt and suffered, and breathes language into the deadened air of grief, forcing herself—and her readers—to scrutinize the pain that racism provokes, and to stand still and ponder its cumulative injury and sorrow.
