Colorfully, referentially, and intellectually dynamic ... A glossy-paged, art exhibition catalog-worthy book ... Though the narrative’s ending verges on negative abstraction, Rankine clearly demands that we confront our failure to prioritize Gazans and reckon the massive resultant losses, personal, ethical, and human alike.
Most of the book follows Rankine’s narrator as she reflects on her life ... She tries to make sense of her privileged yet vulnerable status in the world ... There is, however, disappointingly little discussion of the apt artistic metaphor on the cover, a photograph from Autumn Knight’s brilliant performance piece 'La Querelle des Monstres,' in which Knight and a collaborator are bound into a conjoined sweatsuit. Imagine Rankine, or her narrator, yoked in solidarity to the theorist ... The culminating conversation between the two is so elaborate, involved and painstakingly transcribed that I wondered if it was an act of autofiction. Their dialogue, even more than the nuggets of daily observations and art criticism, is reason enough to read the book.
It didn’t work. That is the howl of grief at the core of Claudia Rankine’s new book ... Reads like a dispatch from a routed army ... Rankine arrives at the opening of Triage having turned 60, buried her mother, and lost a sustaining belief in the future that she thought she was in the vanguard of creating. In the face of such conditions, she writes, 'nothing else functions but one’s grief.' I think this line captures how a lot of Americans feel right now ... But Triage does have a moment in which an ember of the old cruel optimism flickers. Rankine and her friend study a picture of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s daughter. They see, in her innocent eyes, 'finally, the person for whom centuries of survival was for.'
Triage traces a winding, unpredictable story of a relationship sustained by choice ... It may be misleading to say that Triage arranges these moments into a 'story' and more accurate to say that it does to story what Citizen and Just Us do to nonfiction: makes it poetic and opens it up to new ways of seeing. It does this partly by repeatedly circling back through images and developing them in new, unexpected directions ... Continues Rankine’s strategy of weaving text and image together, creating a third space of possibility from their contact ... The rhythm and sound of the language create a feeling of static noise interrupted by occasional glitches. The final passage does not end with a period. The language has collapsed.
Bold and necessary ... Rankine is one of the foremost poets working in the US today, and a vital public intellectual – the master of defiantly didactic, prose-inflected poetry ... A profound meditation on the legacy of radicalism, the fraught but vital possibilities of friendship, the relationship between personal and political forms of love, and the question of whether we can still trust one another enough to collapse alongside one another.
A meditation on grief and exhaustion in a devastated era ... Rankine has long integrated photographs, paintings and other visuals into her texts; they serve to expand, rather than illustrate. Here, she incorporates images of broken, mutilated or in other ways uncomfortable couches. The couch might once have been a place to land, Rankine writes, but now 'repose had lost its softness'. 'Everything,' she tells us, 'was on a collision course with the hardness of now.'
Her sentences are elliptical and some require re-reading before their meanings become clear. It is exhilarating, however, to surrender to the ingenuity and rhythm of Rankine’s writing ... Often harrowing but it never becomes exhausting ... It doesn’t offer easy answers but poses important questions beautifully, mercilessly and with an urgency that will outlast our present predicament.
A fantastical hybrid – part memoir, part reportage, part essay, part lyrical lament – and the complexity of its construction both mirrors and engages with our present moment’s contradictions ... Triage is a challenging book for challenging times: it forces us to look at the world around us without blinking.
Claudia Rankine is one of those idiosyncratic, boundary-shifting writers whose work is often labeled 'fearless' or 'unflinching' ... Her strength doesn’t lie in soldiering through difficulty, but in sitting with it, and in Triage, she dwells precisely in fear and in recoiling from the violent, heartbreaking world we live in ... If you’re looking for hope, or even resoluteness, you will not find it here. If you’re willing to flinch, to shudder and to collapse, the hard questions Triage poses are ones worth sitting with.
Innovative, genre-defying ... While Rankine’s lyrical prose leaves readers with more questions than answers, she demonstrates how a complicated friendship can force self-reflection and change. It’s a thought-provoking response to a broken world.
