The challenge of making racism relevant, or even evident, to those who do not bear the brunt of its ill effects is tricky. Rankine brilliantly pushes poetry’s forms to disarm readers and circumvent our carefully constructed defense mechanisms against the hint of possibly being racist ourselves ... The writing zigs and zags effortlessly between prose poems, images and essays. This is the poet as conceptual artist, in full mastery of her craft. And while the themes of this book could have been mined from any point in America’s history, Rankine sets the whole collection resolutely in the present. Contemporary content and contemporary form mirror each other ... it’s like viewing an experimental film or live performance. One is left with a mix of emotions that linger and wend themselves into the subconscious ... Rankine creates an intentionally disorienting experience, one that mirrors the experience of racial micro-aggressions her subjects encounter. ... throws a Molotov cocktail at the notion that a reduction of injustice is the same as freedom.
Rankine 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.
... 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.
... an especially vital book for this moment in time ... conducts its business, often, with melancholy, but also with wit and a sharable incredulity that sends you running to YouTube ... brilliant, disabusing.
Rankine's achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an unsettled hybrid – her writing on the hard shoulder of prose ... There is so much anger and anguish here that you wonder how it can be contained. But what is wonderful about Rankine’s writing is that it works like an out-of-body experience: she encounters her subject full-on and rises above it. And she never loses her wide-angle reach. Above all, she shows how racism itself gets relegated ... She could not make it plainer: racism is everyone’s problem.
... in describing African American experience, Rankine strives not to 'make it new', but to make it legible — to articulate the contradictory state of invisibility and hypervisibility, of aggressions and microaggressions, that black citizens endure daily in a society that continues to position them as 'other' ... more than an activist manifesto. It is also a careful catalogue of modern history that ensures that both the everyday violences against black Americans and the more publicized instances of racism are retained in collective memory ... Rankine proves that no one way is the best way to channel trauma into creative expression; in an atmosphere of injustice there is no time for pedantic arguments over the superiority of poetry or prose ... It is almost impossible to begin to describe the beauty that Rankine achieves in Citizen; the work is tragic, painful, difficult, even hopeless at times, but more than that it is a momentous act of recording, empowering, witnessing; it is doing what writing is meant to do. Citizen is a compelling testament to Rankine’s place amongst the black scholars and artists she references within the book; it is precisely the kind of text that this society needs to move forward, to honor voices that have been subdued, marginalized, or obliterated for far too long.
... audacious in form. But what is perhaps especially striking about the book is that it has achieved something that eludes much modern poetry: urgency ... is both insistently topical and concerned with intimate moments.
... an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap ... Rankine shows us how dehumanization works—over brunch, in the checkout line, at the university. At the hands of people you admired and trusted. She traces the ions, the shocks and currents that become the storm ... even if there is no solace on offer, this work of careful, loving, restorative witness is itself an act of resistance, a proof of endurance.
This is unprofessional for a critic, but I have to gush: I loved reading Citizen. I love everything about this book: I love the look of it, the feel of it, the words and the design and the passion and the craft of it. Citizen, to me, feels like the future of non-fiction books: a beautiful, book-length essay delivered in raw, vital chunks of text, interspersed with color photos and relevant pieces of art ... It’s a book that uses its very book-ness to enhance and illustrate its author’s point. I would like to read a dozen more books just like Citizen immediately, but there is unfortunately no other book like Citizen to read right now. It’s a magnificent book, one of the finest reading experiences I’ve had in a long time ... ankine’s book — her beautiful, brilliant, indescribable book — is an honest accounting of that persecution, and a good-faith effort to start a conversation. You should answer its call.
... one of those life-changing books ... Citizen is about race but so much more. Visibility, invisibility ... Rankine blurs the line between you and I, between prose and poetry, as she writes eloquently and stingingly of race in America ... Rankine is asking us to change the way we see. If we see, we will be able to act—if we choose.
Read it once and you will probably want to read it again. If anything the situation looks grimmer and more shaming the second time ... The power of Citizen is such that questions of literary form tend to be set aside ... Where Symbolist and Modernist prose poems often exhibit an almost-intolerable density of suggestion, Rankine works by impeccable timing within the paragraph, with an even tone enforcing an implacable verbal economy and exactitude. This is what it's like, she says. It's hard to disagree.
The descriptions are willfully plain, brief and numerous, and the efficiency of Rankine’s prose lets them build up with the force of fact. They are, of course, not as objective as they feel, but that’s part of the point ... Addressability is at the heart of Citizen, the reason that her 'you' marshals such immediate force and leaves behind such intimate unease. It’s the reason that 'for white people' is so problematic, even outside its historical echoes. In saying, even implicitly, who we’re speaking to, we say who we’re willing to exclude ... The depth to which actual violence roots in the blindness of our speaking is essential to Rankine’s argument—that in persistently erasing the reality of being black, we’re damaging the very same, very human bodies we fail to recognize ... one of the best books I’ve ever wanted not to read ... Its genius—and after having spent so much time, some of it reluctant, with this book, I do think that word is appropriate—resides in that capacity to make so many different versions of American life proper to itself, to instruct us in the depth and variety of our participation in a narrative of race that we recount and reinstate, even when we speak as though it weren’t there.
In prose poems and poetic essays as sharp and stinging as a surprise slap to the face, Rankine matter-of-factly chronicles ordinary encounters poisoned by racism ... In poems of solitary reflection, despair, and conviction, the speaker considers the eloquence of sighs and rejects the directive, 'Let it go.' Accompanied by evocative images, Rankine’s arrestingly forthright, emotionally authentic, and artistically lithe inquiry induces us to question and protest every racial assault against our individual and collective humanity.
Rankine does not simply portray that representative injustice; she instead offers a recognition of the opportunities for solidarity within a world impinged upon by appearances. She shows the small, real freedoms in accepting the porousness of a border that other, more privileged, poets might want to keep closed .. reminds us that we cannot pretend our imaginations are simply free when they depend upon so much.
Accounts of racially charged interactions, insidious and flagrant, transpiring in private and in the public eye, distill the immediate emotional intensity of individual experience with tremendous precision while allowing ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and exhaustion to remain in all their fraught complexity. Combining poetry, essay, and images from media and contemporary art, Rankine’s poetics capture the urgency of her subject matter ... Once again Rankine inspires sympathy and outrage, but most of all a will to take a deep look at ourselves and our society.
Within what are often very short pieces or sections, with lots of white space on the page, Rankine more effectively sustains a feeling and establishes a state of being than advances an argument. At times, she can be both provocative and puzzling ... Frequently powerful, occasionally opaque.
