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Book Title

Citizen

Subtitle
An American Lyric
Author 1
Claudia Rankine
Body
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, seemingly 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.

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List Price
$20.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-690-3
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Pages
Pages
160
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8
Keynote
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

About the Author

Claudia  Rankine
Credit: Andrew Zuckerman / The Slowdown
Claudia Rankine is the author of Just Us: An American ConversationCitizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine teaches at New York University.

http://claudiarankine.com/
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Praise

  • “[Citizen] is an especially vital book for this moment in time. . . . As Rankine’s brilliant, disabusing work, always aware of its ironies, reminds us, ‘moving on’ is not synonymous with ‘leaving behind.’”—The New Yorker
  • “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 New York Times Book Review
  • “Part poetry collection, part memoir, part book-length critical essay, Citizen takes risks other books wouldn’t dare, and it reads like no other title on this list. A dazzling meditation on invisibility, blackness, and America.”Slate
  • “Part protest lyric, part art book, Citizen is a dazzling expression of the painful double consciousness of black life in America.” The Washington Post
Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College. Support has been provided by the Manitou Fund as part of the Warner Reading Program.
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