Triage
Truth, Art and Fiction
- Published: 4 August 2026
- ISBN: 9781837314171
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 208
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
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
Ben Lerner
A sharp, forensic inquiry into camaraderie and the way it frays under the pressures of contemporary life
Roger Robinson, author of <i> A Portable Paradise </i>
Startling, clear-eyed, undeniably cool . . . even with the heaviest subjects, she writes with beguiling ease
Colin Grant, Observer
Bold, necessary, profound...full of novelistic richness
Lara Feigel, The New Statesman
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
Max Liu, Financial Times
A fantastical hybrid . . . both mirrors and engages with our present moment’s contradictions
Sarah Crown, Guardian
A fantastical hybrid . . . both mirrors and engages with our present moment’s contradictions
Sarah Crown, Guardian
Bold, necessary, profound...full of novelistic richness
Lara Feigel, The New Statesman
A meditation on grief and exhaustion in a devastated era
Rachel Andrews, The Irish Times
An innovative, genre-defying mix of narrative and criticism centered on a contentious friendship
Publishers Weekly
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
Max Liu, Financial Times
Rankine’s iconoclastic approach to form is as nuanced and fruitful as ever
Franklin Nelson, Prospect Magazine