RaveThe Boston ReviewRankine delivers a spondee like a gut punch. Stressed monosyllables sound in pairs throughout Citizen like gongs of a Greek tragedy—ominous and riveting ... Rankine’s rhythms serve an ethical purpose—they are markers in an assay of the venom that is systemic racism ... The book’s excruciating narratives of racism in familiar setting induce incredible anxiety ... The success of Citizen lies in its searing moral vision and reader-implicating provocations, and it does this work through its singular command of poetic resources. The book reminds poetry readers they do not have to choose between technique and content, concept and pathos, form and politics. To read this book is to yield to hunger for feeling, to bear witness to testimony that demands social change, and to encounter rigorous formal exigencies and structural principles ... Rankine’s lyric is meditative interiority plunged into ice-cold history ... Even her most traditional poetic devices, simile and metaphor, are viscerally felt ... a standout book, a book that might break out of the insular poetry world and reach exponentially more minds than most poetry books do.
Emily Jungmin Yoon
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"... arresting ... Articulation itself is key to these poems’ power: Yoon reminds us that another capacity special to our species is speech ... Yoon’s poems transmute suffering into something that can be communicated...\
Jos Charles
RaveThe Kenyon Review\"Meaning is relentlessly multiple, and piecing together the resonances of Charles’s artificial orthography leaves the reader both fascinated by and unmoored in the fields of discourse her speakers inhabit ... Inquiry into “æffekts” (nice to see the revival of the Old English grapheme ash, “æ”) allows moments of beauty and lyricism to erupt ... Language is used to police gendered identity, often to oppress—to insist a person is this but not that—but it does so on the shakiest possible grounds, and Charles’s dive into the lexicon destabilizes any false sense of assurance we might have of linguistic fixity in the present.\
