In Citizen: An American Lyric, an experience that feels like moving through an art installation, Claudia Rankine positions images amid paragraphs and verse “where […] silence [is] needed” (BOMB).  

In an essay centered on Serena Williams, the speaker asks, “What does a victorious or defeated black woman’s body in a historically white space look like?” (25). A few pages later, Nick Cave’s Soundsuits appears (33), the photograph of a bent-over body in a black, blossom-adorned bodysuit evoking the title of the feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back. 

It is the book itself, however, that struck me first: its heft, its slick, starkly white pages (echoing Zora Neale Hurston’s words referenced in the text and art of Citizen: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background”), how the glossy disembodied hoodie on the cover, a mixed media sculpture by David Hammons called In the Hood (1993), captured my white reflection and held it there. 

Throughout the book, the use of “you” positions readers within an accumulation of spare, intimate scenes in which “race enter[s] the room” (Star Tribune), private rooms and public ones, where readers are asked to dwell in each uneasy encounter, define their place in it—which “you” are you?—and reckon with the resulting accretion. 

Tension builds as each encounter unfolds in a flat, matter-of-fact tone ticking with what is left unsaid, undone. This technique reminded me of an activity designed to heighten awareness of micro-aggressions and their cumulative impact. One person, representing someone with a particular identity or identities, stands while five other people circle slowly and speak, over and over again, remarks that subtly stereotype, marginalize, erode, or erase the person standing. 

In passages where people’s race is not named, pronouns rely on readers to assume race. In an interview with Meara Sharma, Rankine explained how she uses such passages in her classroom. 

“Sometimes I’ll have a student who says, “I don’t really think about race. I don’t see race.” And then I’ll ask, “Well, how do you read this?” And they say, “Oh, that’s a black person, that’s a white person.” (Guernica) 

I assumed too. As I read “Making Space,” in which a woman sits in an empty train seat beside a black man, stepping past another woman who has decided to stand, I pictured the woman who sits down as black (130-3).  

When Rankine read “Making Space” at the National Book Awards Reading, I learned that in the true story behind the script, the woman who filled the space was white. Along with malleable pronouns, Rankine’s syntax mirrors how racism confounds logic, how it can feel familiar and freshly painful, elusive and unmistakable at once, the script for “Stop and Frisk” stating how “Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn’t begin the same way, each time it begins it’s the same” (107). 

While Citizen emerged from Rankine’s reflections on race and her conversations with friends about race, its words and images raise question after question rather than offering answers, subverting efforts by many to label it as a “meditation on race” by becoming as much the reader’s meditation as Rankine’s own. The language’s physicality further demands a visibility that resists retreat into an out-of-body experience. 

When Rankine began documenting the incidents that inform Citizen, she had another purpose in mind: “show[ing] how black people’s health was connected to their day-to-day lives” (Guernica). This original impulse surfaces in her diction: tongue, lungs, larynx, eyes, mouth, feet, arm, throat, ribcage, and stomach among the places that racism lodges in the body, inflicts cuts that rupture any suture meant to hold them closed, the way its chokehold stifles voice and breath. The words catalogue “That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you,” then remind each injured you, “That’s the bruise the ice in the heart was meant to ice” (156). 

Citizen refuses mere mental exercise. Serena Williams, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, citizens abandoned during Katrina—“Have you seen their faces?” the speaker asks (83). Remember, the way a body remembers. 

Citizen’s hybrid form may make it difficult for judges to wedge into familiar award categories, but its immersive mash-up design has allowed it to shapeshift far beyond the confines of the typical audience for either poetry or essays. 

Rankine refers to poetry as “the last gift economy” (Guernica) and this usually bears out in sales, but it appears that like her speaker in Citizen who sits silently in a car in hopes of “bucking the trend [of John Henryism]” (11), Rankine’s book seeks to buck a trend too. At the time of this review, Citizen’s sales rank on Amazon.com was #795, astounding for a work in either genre. Among other books published in October 2014, The Secret History of Wonder Woman ranked #2753 and Picoult’s Leaving Time #620, putting Citizen’s sales rank in the league of bestselling fiction. 

What about its sales rank compared with winners of the 2014 National Book Award for which Rankine was nominated?  The fiction winner, Klay’s Redeployment, ranked #1258, while Faithful and Virtuous Night, the winning poetry collection by one of Rankine’s mentors, Louise Glück, ranked #18,613, admirably high for a poetry book.

In sentences often deceptively plain, Rankine has opened the sometimes gated communities of poetry and essay to invite conversations about Citizen in spaces outside academia, as well as within and across disciplines as varied as epidemiology, women’s studies, law, psychology, and government. And while her craft can spark analysis in the expected literature and writing courses (including analysis of elements not discussed in this review, such as allusion and metaphor), online videos for several scripts in section VI, as well as online excerpts, including earlier versions of scenes, support explorations of the contrast between page and screen, and comparisons of shorter pieces with this book-length work.

Published in the wake of Ferguson, many critics hailed Citizen as timely, yet Rankine’s meticulous lyric could have rung just as timely, just as American, at any point in our history thus far. Perhaps the now into which it is sung will shape how we hear its notes and its silences, how we respond to its insistent hum. 

 Situation videos for scripts in section VI
·         In Memory of Trayvon Martin (a.k.a. Situation 5)
·         Stop and Frisk (a.k.a. Situation 6)
·         World Cup (a.k.a. Zidane, Situation 1) – in Blackbird 9.1 (Spring 2010)
·         Making Room (a.k.a. Situation 7)
Situation videos, sometimes in slightly different versions, are also available on Claudia Rankine’s web site. Click on situations, then on numbers in corners of next web page.

Excerpts and earlier versions of scenes from Citizen
·         from That Were Once Beautiful Children (previous title of Citizen) – in Lana Turner #5
·         “Be Angry” – in Lana Turner #6
·         from That Were Once Beautiful Children – in Boston Review (30 April 2012)
·         “You are in the dark, in the car…” – in Poetry (March 2014) – includes audio

This month’s featured poem is the first in Reaching Guantánamo, a series of nine poems that are imagined letters to Salim Hamdan from his wife written by Solmaz Sharif, an Iranian-American poet.

Sharif wrote these poems in 2008 after reading an article about Hamdan in The New York Times. All nine are linked from Paperbag’s table of contents for their summer 2010 issue.

These poems navigate the incendiary human territories of war, torture, and erasure. By erasing words to mimic government redaction of documents, Sharif’s poems evoke the loss, separation, and anguish inflicted by censoring a person's communication, and by the collateral individual and cultural erasures that can result.

However, Sharif’s practice of erasure differs from that of her peers who blackout or erase words from real source documents to isolate words they wish to remain as a poem. Through this process, they exert a power similar to that wielded by governments when they redact sources. 

Reaching Guantánamo resists this pattern by erasing imagined words instead. Since she is not striking words from real letters, Sharif was not privy to any details Hamdan was actually denied; she saw no words now hidden from the reader. Through the process of imagining these letters, she birthed each absence, each denial of intimacy and ancestry, each anxiety-provoking deletion. 

Consider the denials and deletions in this poem's opening lines. 

These poems provoke discussion about topics we often evade, like the CIA’s practice of “extraordinary rendition.” According to the NYT article, Hamdan was a former driver for Osama bin Laden charged with helping bin Laden avoid capture.  His lawyers sought to delay his prosecution due to mental instability they said was caused by Hamdan being kept in solitary confinement at least 22 hours per day for over six years.  Hamdan was convicted in late 2008, released in 2009, and his conviction was overturned in 2012.

Sharif wrote an essay about her perspective on the poetics of erasure for Evening Will Come.  A Stegner Fellow, she is currently "working on a poetic rewrite of the U.S.Department of Defense Dictionary." 

Her poem "Family of Scatterable Mines" was published in The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles (Michigan State UP, 2012). Others, such as "Look," "Mess Hall," and "Drone ," are available online. Paired with the latter poem by Sharif, "The Cup Runneth Over" by Shailja Patel, whose collection Migritude was reviewed here in January, provides a similar perspective on drones. 

In a Kenyon Review interview, Sharif said it surprises her that "in addition to empathy, my writing requires a callousness. Maybe this is the nature of the material I immerse myself in—mostly testimony of warfare and imprisonment. Maybe this is the nature of the craft—that putting language, putting music first requires a kind of violence."

It appears that the summer 2010 issue was Paperbag’s only publication, so it's uncertain how long the site will remain available. 

“Family Stories” by Dorianne Laux speaks to the things we often learn to keep inside: family secrets, our best friend’s confession, where Uncle Ned stashes his bourbon so Aunt Louise can’t find it. 

It invites exploration of that vulnerable negotiation of first dates and falling in love, in measuring our story, our family, against other families, other people we might have become, or still could be.

In regard to craft, this poem is wonderful for studying how opening lines draw the reader into the poem, and how they set the scene quickly…

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,
how an argument once ended when his father
seized a lit birthday cake in both hands
and hurled it out a second-story window. That,

…as well as for its narrative arc and the birthday cake that anchors the poem’s story onto the page like sandbags keeping a hot air balloon from lifting off – all that tension of anticipated release held in place.

One of my favorite standalone lines is “and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed”(9). If you bring this poem into the classroom, you may want to offer it as a journal prompt, or pair it with “What’s Broken.”

This poem will be among those included in a new current I'm adding to the poems page of Poetry River later this spring: voices of resilience. I'll post more information about this new current soon, and send an announcement to subscribers of Poetry River updates.

The poetic currents featured at Poetry River include poems of work and economic struggle. Although told through the voice of fictional speaker, Bead, the story that poet Anne-Marie Oomen tells in un-coded woman (Milkweed, 2006) was inspired by women with whom she stood shoulder-to-shoulder at a canning factory working third shift.

Bead’s story is one of survival, struggle, and ultimately, strength. In “I Have Taken the Line,” readers meet her bruised in her battered truck, sharing a smoke with the hitchhiker with whom she’ll seek shelter near the shores of Lake Michigan: Barn. 

Already, we sense the grit that fueled her escape from an abusive home and will pull her through:
I drive like a flood busting open sluice
gates, like my whole past wants me
drowned but I’m not going down.

Oomen describes Bead as “a little rebellious and smart-ass,…with a tender side.” Throughout the collection’s absorbing narrative, we see her meet life’s rough edges unflinchingly whether she has a plan or is still weighing her options.

Imagery, dialect, and metaphor surprise too with battered pickup, gutting table, buckshot-pocked door, charred burgers, “waves big as horses’ asses,” and hunger that “burns / like old tires can’t get put out.” The deft music of Oomen’s sonic craft sings across the pages like a well-cast line arcing across wide water.

Bead’s life is one lived as close to glimpses of nature’s quiet wisdom as to the pain people inflict on one another. Consider this section of “Light Has Been Extinguished” quoted in a 2007 interview with Oomen published in Madison, Wisconsin’s The Daily Page:

I come back to the dark place,
to the scrub acres where the cabin sits,
where these cloudy nights work on me.

You know, old-timers say it’s best
to look at a sky without stars--
it will show you what you are

without any light at all.

The poem titles are based on codes from the International Code of Signals, a stylistic trait that provides another way into the collection for readers drawn to water - and another way to link poems to the curriculum. This innovative organizational structure is also another reason that un-coded woman serves as a multifaceted resource for young poets, whether studying persona poems, narrative arc, voice, or structure.