The word as image and the image as word are Rankine’s tools, and she mines both mediums elegantly and resonantly, as a skillful and humane curator of cultural artifacts as diverse as YouTube videos and French art house films. In this new collection she continues to meditate on race, gender, sports, popular culture, celebrity, and the intersections of these cultural forms, to further pursue the limits of poetry in spanning the gap between experience and language, images and words.Ĭitizen is a text that extends beyond words, to visual language and rhetoric, the way things appear to the artist’s eye, how pictures, modern art, and images work in conjunction with text, verse, and prose-these mediums work together to constitute something beautiful yet brutal. Rankine continues her use of the lyric form from her 2004 collection, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. What is consolation in these times? What does it mean? Is it even a viable option for those who have been disenfranchised to the point of death and continual dying, to the African American and nonwhite “others” in America who fail to even be recognized as full citizens? Throughout her book, Rankine challenges her audience to recognize the inadequateness and emptiness of our culture’s consolatory moves, drawing attention to the inability of our country to provide solace to a suffering body of disjointed yet persistently entwined citizens. We realize that consolation never counts in moments when people fail to see you. Thus ends the first section of Rankine’s book. In consolatory reply, the therapist utters the ineffectual apology: “I am so sorry, so so sorry” to the silent speaker. Reading this moment in Rankine’s work, I feel as if I’ve earned something, as if she is finally offering me, the reader, the consolation I’ve hungrily and anxiously been waiting for since the book’s terse epigraph from Sans Soleil: “If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.” But full consolation doesn’t ever seem possible or even desirable for the speaker, such as when the “new therapist specializes in trauma counseling” answers her front door and yells at the speaker, “Get away from my house,” and, “What are you doing in my yard?” only to be chastened by the realization that this nonwhite trespasser is actually her new client. But it is the black man who creates…This endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.” Beautiful, she writes, and I repeat it to myself. Six chapters into her latest book, Claudia Rankine writes, “It is the White Man who creates the black man.

American lyric