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Triage
  • Published: 4 August 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837314171
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192
Categories:

Triage

Truth, Art and Fiction

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The bestselling author of Citizen returns with a deeply moving tale of friendship and grief in the face of personal and collective loss

‘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.
  • Published: 4 August 2026
  • ISBN: 9781837314171
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192
Categories:

About the author

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist and playwright; her numerous works include the ground-breaking American Lyric trilogy, Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Citizen (2014) and Just Us (2020). A chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets, she is the recipient of many honours, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Forward Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She is a professor of creative writing at New York University, and has previously taught at Pomona College and Yale University.

portrait photo of Claudia Rankine

Also by Claudia Rankine

Plot
Solo Nosotros
Just Us
Penguin Modern Poets 6
Don't Let Me Be Lonely
Citizen
See all

Praise for Triage

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

Saidiya Hartman

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’

Homi K. Bhabha

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

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

Jamaica Kincaid

Rankine is a literary icon, so it’s no surprise that she’s found ways to blend genres and formats into her next book. . . . Rankine explores the backdrop of violence that has only intensified in recent years, as well as the love that keeps us together in emotionally numbing times

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