- Graywolf Press
BY THE TIME you read this, Claudia Rankine may have already won this year’s National Book Award in poetry, and if she hasn’t, something has gone wrong. Rankine’s NBA-nominated Citizen: An American Lyric is one of the best books I’ve read all year, and easily the most necessary. You can tell why by looking at the cover photograph, David Hammons’ 1993 “In the Hood”: the sliced-off top of a faded black hooded sweatshirt, disembodied and evocative of every possible meaning such an image has come to signify. You might think of lynchings. You might think of Trayvon Martin. You might think of the Ku Klux Klan. And you’d be right.
To read Citizen is to revisit some of the most damning miscarriages of American justice over the past decade: Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six case, and the murders of Trayvon Martin and Mark Duggan are only a few of Rankine’s subjects. Citizen works on a macro- and micro-level, moving between national news and numerous micro-aggressions in the everyday life of an unnamed narrator (“you”): a neighbor calls the police when he sees one of your friends on the phone outside your house; a woman changes parking spots when she sees you in the car next to her. Citizen reveals the adverse cumulative effects of internalizing these daily acts of oppression: “You take in things you don’t want all the time,” writes Rankine, until “the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.”