Citizen

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

Nick Laird, New York Review of Books

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

Smitha Khorana, Guardian

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

Holly Bass, The New York Times

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

Marjorie Perloff

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"

Dan Chiasson, New Yorker