Reviews of Don't Let Me Be Lonely

“Out of short prose segments with the gravity of poetry, avant-garde poet Rankine assembles a very direct and moving meditation on Americans and death. A friend’s cancer, accounts of Rankine’s dreams, 9/11, documents about the African AIDS crisis, and many other elements flow together like the motifs in the slow movement of a Beethoven symphony.” —Utne

“Don’t Let Me be Lonely is a success, possessing a clarity—an absence of jargon/impenetrable mystagogery—that tropes the common experimental model of opacity….Rankine has graced us not only with her presence, but the ability to make ourselves present—to separate our consciousness from the droning media that drowns out life’s possibilities.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Elegant and eloquent…[Rankine] holds up a mirror (the mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet?) and what we see there can be chilling indeed.” —American Book Review

“I don’t know of a book of poems that so unabashedly, startlingly, successfully partakes of this contemporary combination of turbulence and torpor. It’s consuming to read, engulfing. Raw.” —Pleiades

“Striking out from ground zero, she still sees territory for lighting. I say let’s go.” —Bridge Online

“Page after page, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely offers a staggering record of a response to the media before and after 9/11 beyond anything the Department of Veterans Affairs foresaw.” —NYFA