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The ultimate Black History Month reading list

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Where to start reading poetry (again)

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Interviews

How Maggie Nelson found freedom

Plot

'Exquisite . . . readers will find themselves transformed by it' Claire Lynch 
'Stunning . . . dazzlingly laser-like and movingly original' Lara Feigel 
'Inventive and searching' Calvin Bedient 
'I am awestruck . . . a masterpiece' Mary Gordon 
 
The stunningly original exploration of pregnancy and childbirth by the acclaimed author of Citizen 
 
In this, the landmark achievement that crowned the first phase of her writing career, Claudia Rankine invites us into the lives of Liv and her husband Erland, as they find themselves propelled into the classic plot: boy loves girl, girl gets pregnant. The couple's journey is charted through dreams, conversations and reflections, in a text like no other, deftly moulding language and crossing genres to arrive at new life: baby Ersatz. 
 
Plot is an inventive and engrossing meditation on pregnancy and the changes it heralds: the potential bodily cost, the loss of self, the sense of impending stasis. Each fear compounds Liv's reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world. A profoundly daring collection, it explodes the emotive capabilities of language and form to achieve an unparalleled understanding of creation and existence.

Exquisite . . . This collection is made from language to live on and in. It's the sort of book you read with your body as much as your mind. I'm quite sure readers will find themselves transformed by it

It's both stunning and utterly logical that before embarking on the landmark American Trilogy where she would tackle the largest themes of public life with such personal detail and vehemence, Claudia Rankine's writing was grounded in this dazzlingly laser-like and movingly original meditation on not so much motherhood or parenthood as pregnancy itself. Rankine slides from one form to another, and animates everyday domestic life with a grand sense of literary history and sensibility. It's as if this book is pregnant with her entire poetic project

Plot is inexhaustibly complex, varied, and difficult-and as fearlessly and even grimly inventive and searching as one can conceive any book of poems as being. It instantly joins the few contemporary works ... whose gravity is synonymous with the passion and integrity of their intelligence

To read her work is to be drawn deep into a thought's unfolding, into the eerie landscape of a dream; the dislocation one feels is tempered by the assurance of the writing, the deftness of Rankine's experiments with words and ideas

I am awestruck. Quite simply, I have never read anything like Plot. Its stupendous intelligence . . . marks it as a masterpiece

Plot moves as in a picaresque novel, in which the body schemes and frightens, accompanied by Claudia Rankine's instinct for poetic surprise

A fiercely gifted poet . . . She knows when to bless and to curse . . . [and] makes you hopeful for American poetry

A startling and eloquent exploration of states in, about, and around maternity . . . This is an unsettling poetry of the body wrestling itself in the making of thought

Spiraling around the story of "Liv" and "Erland" and their future child, "Ersatz," this book-length poem embeds its loose "plot" in the sensations and anxieties of birth and child-rearing . . . striking . . . This book seems consciously aimed at the nexus of several different feminist avant-garde projects, from the nouveau roman of Monique Wittig to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee

[Claudia Rankine's] books trace their own sort of movement . . . In Plot, the crisis sharpens, revolving around life and birth-the narrative center is a woman reluctant to give birth to a child who is already growing inside her . . . surprising

In this, the landmark achievement that crowned the first phase of her writing career, Claudia Rankine invites us into the lives of Liv and her husband Erland, as they find themselves propelled into the classic plot: boy loves girl, girl gets pregnant. The couple's journey is charted through dreams, conversations and reflections, in a text like no other, deftly moulding language and crossing genres to arrive at new life: baby Ersatz. 
 
Plot is an inventive and engrossing meditation on pregnancy and the changes it heralds: the potential bodily cost, the loss of self, the sense of impending stasis. Each fear compounds Liv's reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world. A profoundly daring collection, it explodes the emotive capabilities of language and form to achieve an unparalleled understanding of creation and existence.

An American Conversation

Just Us

A TLS, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, GUARDIAN, OBSERVER AND WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR 
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION 
 
From award-winning writer Claudia Rankine, the stunning follow-up to Citizen and Don't Let Me Be Lonely 
 
'Riveting' Bernardine Evaristo, TLS (Books of the Year) 
'Brilliant' Gary Younge, New Statesman (Books of the Year) 
'Timely and powerful' Fatima Bhutto, Financial Times 
'One of our time's most incisive, brilliant and necessary intellectuals' Seán Hewitt, Irish Times 
'Ranking is a writer of genius' Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times 
 
At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences? 
 
Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces where our public and private lives intersect, like the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth - and urges us to enter into the conversations which could offer the only humane pathways through this moment of division. 
 
Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, and to breach the silence, guilt and violence that surround whiteness. Brilliantly arranging essays, images and poems along with the voices and rebuttals of others, it counterpoints Rankine's own text with facing-page notes and commentary, and closes with a bravura study of women confronting the political and cultural implications of dyeing their hair blonde. 
 
Wry, vulnerable and prescient, this is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, and being together.

Claudia Rankine marshalls the full range of her substantial talents - from poetry to essay - to explore how racism is lived, privilege is expressed and engagement might be possible. Personal, political, interrogative and, most all, impressive

This brilliant and multi-layered work is a call, a bid, an insistent, rightly impatient demand for a public conversation on whiteness . . . bold and vital

In my work, well-meaning white people consistently ask me how to recognize racism. Yet we might ask, "How have we managed not to know?" The information is everywhere, if we care to listen . . . With clarity and grace, Claudia Rankine delivers a gut punch to white denial. Just Us is stunning work - audacious, revelatory, devastating

In Just Us, Claudia Rankine continues her remarkable and brilliant interrogation of the language, culture, and history that have shaped America, forging through poems, essays, and documents a literary archive that is utterly original and desperately needed

Fiercely intimate, rigorous . . . [Just Us] lets all of us in on the conversations - with others and the self - that are necessary for survival

At the theatre, around the dinner table, in the airport and in the voting booth, what fractures lie beneath the veneer of contemporary civility and rhetorical claims to unity? What happens if we actually acknowledge them? And when we do, how can we strive to stay in the room with one other? 
 
 In a series of real-life conversations with both friends and strangers, Claudia Rankine set out to explore these questions, taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy - and a willingness to be surprised - as her guiding light. Just Us is the record of those encounters. Brilliantly arranging essays, images and poems along with the voices and rebuttals of others, it counterpoints Rankine's own text with facing-page notes and commentary, and along the way considers a typically enlightening and unexpected range of issues, from priority boarding queues to the political and cultural implications of women dyeing their hair blonde. 
 
 Wry, vulnerable and prescient, this is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right - and in always feeling comfortable - than in being true and being together.

Die Deeper into Life

Penguin Modern Poets 6

The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct, collectible, lovingly-assembled guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry, from the UK, America and beyond. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the seasoned poetry lover and the curious reader alike to encounter our most exciting new voices. 
 
Volume 6, Dark Looks, features the work of Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine, the two American poets who, in hybrid books bridging the divide between poetry, lyric prose, life-writing and theory such as Bluets, The Argonauts, Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, have transformed the literary landscape over the last 15 years, alongside that of Denise Riley, who for decades has been exploring closely related concerns - motherhood; identity and oppression; loss; the language and words that build, or assault, our selves - as one of the best-kept secrets of British poetry, now fittingly recognized by a string of shortlistings and awards. These are writers who combine deep thought with deep feeling to illuminate our world, how we suffer in it, how we resist it, and how we can live with and love it.

An American Lyric

Don't Let Me Be Lonely

The award-winning poet's powerful exploration of an America ever more unable to process its own toxins 
 
Here, available for the first time in the UK, is the book in which Claudia Rankine first developed the 'American Lyric' form which makes her Forward Prize-winning collection Citizen so distinctive: an original combination of poetry, lyric essay, photography and visual art, virtuosically deployed. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is Rankine's meditation on the self bewildered by race riots, terrorism, medicated depression and television's ubiquitous influence. Written in the years after 9/11, this is an unflinching and deeply felt meditation on life and death in a nation in flux.

Rankine brilliantly pushes poetry's forms ... one is left with a mix of emotions that linger and wend themselves into the subconscious

An unforgettable book ... mesmerizing ... terrifying

I don't know of a book of poems that so unabashedly, startlingly, successfully partakes of this contemporary combination of turbulence and torpor ... consuming

Here, available for the first time in the UK, is the book in which Claudia Rankine first developed the 'American Lyric' form which makes her Forward Prize-winning collection Citizen so distinctive: an original combination of poetry, lyric essay, photography and visual art, virtuosically deployed. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is Rankine's meditation on the self bewildered by race riots, terrorism, medicated depression and television's ubiquitous influence. Written during George W. Bush's presidency in an America still reeling from the 9/11 attacks and charging headlong into war in Iraq, this is an early 21st-century work of great wit, intelligence and depth of feeling, with urgent lessons for the present.

Citizen

WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2015 
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY 2015 
WINNER OF THE PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD 2015 
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR POETRY 2015 
 
 
'Everywhere were flashes, a siren sounding and a stretched-out roar. Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. Then I just knew. 
 
'And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.' 
 
 
In this moving, critical and fiercely intelligent collection of prose poems, Claudia Rankine examines the experience of race and racism in Western society through sharp vignettes of everyday discrimination and prejudice, and longer meditations on the violence - whether linguistic or physical - which has impacted the lives of Serena Williams, Zinedine Zidane, Mark Duggan and others. 
 
Citizen weaves essays, images and poetry together to form a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in an ostensibly 'post-race' society.

Wonderfully capacious and innovative. In her riffs on the demotic, in her layering of incident, Rankine finds a new way of writing about race in America

Citizen feels raw ... this documentary-style look at America has catapulted Rankine into the spotlight ... She speaks to the vastly different ways racism and injustice are perpetuated across class lines in America today

What does it mean to be a black citizen in the US of the early twenty-first century? Claudia Rankine's brilliant, terse and parabolic prose poems have a shock value rarely found in poetry. These tales of everyday life - whether the narrator's or the lives of young black men like Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson - dwell on the most normal exteriors and the most ordinary of daily situations so as to expose what is really there: a racism so guarded and carefully masked as to make it all the more insidious ... Citizen is an unforgettable book

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"

In this moving, critical and fiercely intelligent collection of prose poems, Claudia Rankine examines the experience of race and racism in Western society through sharp vignettes of everyday discrimination and prejudice, and longer meditations on the violence - whether linguistic or physical - which has impacted the lives of Serena Williams, Zinedine Zidane, Mark Duggan and others. 
 
Awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in America after becoming the first book in the prize's history to be a finalist in both the poetry and criticism categories, Citizen weaves essays, images and poetry together to form a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our ostensibly "post-race" society.

Claudia Rankine

A masterwork, faultless and taut, that stitches together a fractured, aching world with precise and subtle language that refuses to ever falter under the weight of the profundity of Claudia Rankine’s conclusions. Her genius takes on the deepest questions of our spirits

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Pulitzer-Prize winner for Feature Writing 2018

Bold, necessary, profound...full of novelistic richness

Stunning... an extended meditation on the collective devastation of the present. The beauty of Rankine’s dense, elliptical sentences guides us through

A sharp, forensic inquiry into camaraderie and the way it frays under the pressures of contemporary life

Roger Robinson, author of A Portable Paradise

Claudia Rankine’s remarkable, outstanding odyssey—an account of our present, which is also our past, which is always our future—is beautifully rendered in a kaleidoscope of images and sensations. Triage is exquisite

In Claudia Rankine’s writing, we feel traditional genres buckle under the catastrophes of the present—and then she shows us how new possibilities of form and feeling might emerge

Startling, clear-eyed, undeniably cool . . . even with the heaviest subjects, she writes with beguiling ease

Claudia Rankine’s lines profoundly question the validity and viability of ‘these truths,’ whether spoken in faith or twisted out of shape. Rankine’s body poetic refuses the compromises and consolations of the body politic. Triage is her elegiac anti-memoir of ‘these times’

It is exhilarating to surrender to the ingenuity and rhythm of Rankine’s writing...It doesn’t offer easy answers but poses important questions beautifully, mercilessly and with an urgency that will outlast our present predicament

A fantastical hybrid . . . both mirrors and engages with our present moment’s contradictions

Truth, Art and Fiction

‘We are being asked to hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language or policy for’ 
 
Two friends meet in an art gallery after decades of silence. The idealism that once bound them together fissured and fractured under the weight of collective and personal griefs. Through their memories of youthful certainty, the antagonism of their conversation and the embers of their enduring kinship, they navigate the wreckage of our world today – the hope, the anger and the exhaustion. 
 
In her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet, Claudia Rankine blends narrative, memory and criticism in a poignant exploration of the beautiful but complicated friendships that we rely on to unsettle us, to make us better – exposing the fiction in the facts of our lives and demanding action in our time of relentless loss.

Claudia Rankine

Praise for Triage

A masterwork, faultless and taut, that stitches together a fractured, aching world with precise and subtle language that refuses to ever falter under the weight of the profundity of Claud ...

Bold, necessary, profound...full of novelistic richness

Stunning... an extended meditation on the collective devastation of the present. The beauty of Rankine’s dense, elliptical sentences guides us through

A masterwork, faultless and taut, that stitches together a fractured, aching world with precise and subtle language that refuses to ever falter under the weight of the profundity of Claud ...

Bold, necessary, profound...full of novelistic richness

Stunning... an extended meditation on the collective devastation of the present. The beauty of Rankine’s dense, elliptical sentences guides us through

A masterwork, faultless and taut, that stitches together a fractured, aching world with precise and subtle language that refuses to ever falter under the weight of the profundity of Claud ...

Bold, necessary, profound...full of novelistic richness

Stunning... an extended meditation on the collective devastation of the present. The beauty of Rankine’s dense, elliptical sentences guides us through

Books by Claudia Rankine

Articles featuring Claudia Rankine

The ultimate Black History Month reading list

Where to start reading poetry (again)

How Maggie Nelson found freedom

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