RaveThe New York Review of Books... a circuitous and intimate descent into the poet’s past in order to examine race in America ... Rankine writes almost exclusively in the second-person present, a tense that implicates as it includes, endowing events with a sense of immediacy and urgency ... The impression is of an intensely sensitive writer—in both senses—trying to confront the mess of modern America with a clear critique ... Rankine’s language continually undermines the casual reading it encourages, revealing how exchanges are coded, complex, how tone decides everything ... One problem with writing poetry about political or historical issues is that poetry proves a terrible method for transmitting real information. The personal poems in Citizen, the anecdotes and micro-aggressions, have considerably more power than the more abstracted ones ... is on the cusp of poetry and critique ... wonderfully capacious and innovative. In her riffs on the demotic, in her layering of incident, she finds a new way of writing about race in America ... Rankine’s series of anecdotes are geared to a purpose and theme: they are ethical formulations that are too honest and angry to be merely presentations; they’re intended as proofs.
