Claudia Rankine

Collects essays, poetry, and images that expose the racial tensions in twenty-first century life, highlighting the slights, slips of the tongue, and intentional offensives that pervade the home, school, and popular media.

An American Lyric

Citizen

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation—Just Us urges all of us into it As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.

An American Conversation

Just Us

In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.

Don't Let Me Be Lonely

A play about the imagined fault line between black and white lives by Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama. The scenes in this one-act play, for all the characters’ disagreements, stalemates, and seeming impasses, explore what happens if one is willing to stay in the room when it is painful to bear the pressure to listen and the obligation to respond. —from the introduction by Claudia Rankine Claudia Rankine’s first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible? Composed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming artist Charlotte. Their conversation about art and representations of race spirals toward the devastation of Virginia and Charles’s intentions. One year later, the second scene brings Charlotte and Charles into the artist’s studio, and their confrontation raises both the stakes and the questions of what—and who—is actually on display. Rankine’s The White Card is a moving and revelatory distillation of racial divisions as experienced in the white spaces of the living room, the art gallery, the theater, and the imagination itself.

A Play

The White Card

Claudia Rankine's second poetry collection, The End of the Alphabet, is an inquiry into despair and recovery, selfhood and alienation.

The End of the Alphabet

Plot

Denise Riley

Maggie Nelson

Rankine Maggie

Penguin Modern Poets 6

Max King Cap

Beth Loffreda

Frank, fearless letters from poets of all colors, genders, classes about the material conditions under which their art is made.

Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind

The Racial Imaginary

Att vara människa är att vilja delta, även om det innebär att du öppnar dig för ett våldsamt, sårande tilltal från världen. Att vara medborgare är att förväntas delta, även när samhället du lever i fängslar, skadar, dödar kroppar som ser ut som din. Medborgare är ett litterärt vittnesbörd om hur rasismen genomsyrar våra dagliga liv och en av de senaste årens mest lästa och omtalade amerikanska poesiböcker. Med en blandning av poesi, prosa, essä och bild naglar Rankine fast problematiken i att vara den andre, och utmanar förståelsen av begreppet medborgarskap. Exemplen kommer från framgångsrika personer som Serena Williams och Zinedine Zidane likaväl som från TV, kön i matvarubutiken och klassrummet. Boken har tilldelats en mängd priser, bland annat National Book Critics Circle Award och PEN Open Book Award. Översättare: Marie Silkeberg och Jenny Tunedal

Medborgare : En amerikansk dikt

Claudia Rankine. Lass mich nicht einsam sein

una conversación estadounidense

Solo nosotros

A Conversation

A “harrowing and hallucinogenic” collection of poems from author of the New York Times–bestselling National Book Award-finalist Citizen: An American Lyric (Library Journal). Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem about rising racial tensions in America, Citizen: An American Lyric, won numerous prizes, including the The National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Her new collection of poems—intrepid, obsessive, and erotic—tell the story of a woman’s attempt to reconcile herself to her own despair. Drawing on voices from Jane Eyre to Lady MacBeth, Rankine welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque. Whether writing about intimacy or alienation, what remains long after is her singular voice—its beguiling cadence and vivid physicality. There is an unprotected quality to this writing, as if each word has been pushed out along the precipice, daring us to go with it. Rankine’s power lies in the intoxicating pull of that dare. From one of contemporary poetry’s most powerful and provocative authors, The End of the Alphabet is a work where “wits at once keen and tenacious match themselves against grief’s genius” (Boston Review).

Poems

Claudia Rankines prosalyrikk utgjer eit sterkt, moderne vitnesbyrd om det å leve i ein svart kropp i eit kvitt USA. Rankine skriv om kvardagsrasisme frå framande og frå velmeinande vener, på butikken og på universitetet der ho arbeidar. Ho skriv om Serena Williams, om politivald, om prekære liv som formast av sosioøkonomiske og rasistiske strukturar, i eit land der jamstilling for loven reknast som ei udiskutabel sjølvfølge. Teksten står tidvis åleine, tidvis side om side med bildande kunst som minnast svarte ofre for politivald i Amerika. Samlinga er omsett av Camara Lundestad Joof og Kristina Leganger Iversen. Omtala er utarbeidd av BS.

eit amerikansk dikt

Medborgar

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.

Die Deeper into Life

Juliana Spahr

Any serious poet or lover of poetry will welcome this anthology which shows the rich diversity of perspectives in which women poets expand and contest the current state of the art.

Where Lyric Meets Language

American Women Poets in the 21st Century

Michael Dowdy

Poetics of Social Engagement emphasizes the ways in which innovative American poets have blended art and social awareness, focusing on aesthetic experiments and investigations of ethnic, racial, gender, and class subjectivities. Rather than consider poetry as a thing apart, or as a tool for asserting identity, this volume’s poets create sites, forms, and modes for entering the public sphere, contesting injustices, and reimagining the contemporary. Like the earlier anthologies in this series, this volume includes generous selections of poetry as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays. This unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching tools. A companion website will present audio of each poet’s work. Poets included: Rosa Alcalá Brian Blanchfield Daniel Borzutzky Carmen Giménez Smith Allison Hedge Coke Cathy Park Hong Christine Hume Bhanu Kapil Mauricio Kilwein Guevara Fred Moten Craig Santos Perez Barbara Jane Reyes Roberto Tejada Edwin Torres Essayists included: John Alba Cutler Chris Nealon Kristin Dykstra Joyelle McSweeney Chadwick Allen Danielle Pafunda Molly Bendall Eunsong Kim Michael Dowdy Brent Hayes Edwards J. Michael Martinez Martin Joseph Ponce David Colón Urayoán Noel

Poetics of Social Engagement

American Poets in the 21st Century

Showcases the most innovative and politically engaged poets working in the U.S.

This poetry collection by the acclaimed author of Citizen presents an “inexhaustibly complex, varied, and . . . grimly inventive” meditation on maternity (Verse). In Claudia Rankine’s Plot, an expectant mother, Liv, and her husband, Erland, find themselves propelled into one of our most basic plots: boy loves girl, girl gets pregnant. Liv’s respect for life, however, makes her reluctant to bring a new life into the world. The couple’s electrifying journey is charted through dreams, conversations, and reflections. A text like no other, it crosses genres, existing at times in poetry, at times in dialogue and prose, in order to arrive at new life and baby Ersatz. This stunning, avant-garde performance enacts what it means to be human, and to invest in humanity. “Plot moves as in a picaresque novel, in which the body schemes and frightens, accompanied by Claudia Rankine’s instinct for poetic surprise.” —Barbara Guest, poet and author of Herself Defined

MoMA PS1 presents the fourth iteration of Greater New York. Recurring every five years, the exhibition has traditionally showcased the work of emerging artists living and working in the New York metropolitan area. Considering the "greater" aspect of its title in terms of both geography and time, Greater New York. begins roughly with the moment when MoMA PS1 was founded in 1976 as an alternative venue that took advantage of disused real estate, reaching back to artists who engaged the margins of the city. In conjunction with the exhibition, MoMA PS1 is publishing a series of readers that will be released throughout the run of the exhibition. These short volumes revisit older histories of New York while also inviting speculation about its future, highlighting certain works in the exhibition and engaging a range of subjects including disco, performance anxiety, real estate and newly unearthed historical documents. The series features contributions from Fia Backström, Mark Beasley, Gregg Bordowitz, Susan Cianciolo, Douglas Crimp, Catherine Damman, David Grubbs, Angie Keefer, Aidan Koch, Glenn Ligon, Gordon Matta-Clark, Claudia Rankine, Collier Schorr, and Sukhdev Sandhu, concluding with a round-table conversation with exhibition curators Peter Eleey, Douglas Crimp, Thomas J. Lax and Mia Locks. The series is edited by Jocelyn Miller, Curatorial Associate, MoMA PS1.

Claudia Rankine

Books

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