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

Published in 2013 by Persea Books, Mitchell Douglas’s autobiographical second collection \blak\ \al-fe bet\: Poems blends personal, American, and Southern history, with elegy and praise. It is a collection rich in place and family.

There’s the way he misses his grandmother, Mamie Lee, the matriarch of his family, “like an ache” - something she used to say to him and the rest of her grandchildren (The Poets Weave). His grandparents were sharecroppers in Alabama and as a child, Douglas often took the train from Louisville to visit them (“Writing Home” - Louisville Magazine).

There are poems that evoke history - the way “Tallahatchie” weaves together Douglas's teaching of Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till (a crown of sonnets) with his experience following a white pickup truck with Mississippi plates during a lightning storm while grief, anger, sorrow, and determination rise inside him - “no cotton gin fans, no barbed wire clues, just my pen...living and mourning at 30 MPH.” The poem’s close - “the classroom, no safer” - is one that will spark reflection and discussion.

Douglas also introduces a new six-line form: the fret, of which there are three in the collection.

Echoing the blues theme of his persona collection about Donny Hathaway, Cooling Board, the fret builds on the visual framework of a guitar's neck. Each line begins with the letter of the corresponding string (EADGBE), and vertical caesuras break the lines into three parts, as in this excerpt from “The Sorrows (A Fret in Three Chords)":

With \blak\ \al-fe bet\, Douglas, a founding member of Affrilachian poets, offers readers personal connections and teachers curriculum connections.  Maurice Manning calls it “a book of profound grief,” while Patricia Smith says “every line is threaded with funk and ferocity.”

To hear Douglas read his poems, listen to the related The Poets Weave podcast on Indiana public radio. There’s also a  teacher’s guide available for the book by Marilyn Nelson that Douglas references in “Tallahatchie”.

On her course syllabi at SUNY Fredonia, Aimee Nezhukumatathil often includes a quote from Rachel Carson: “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction” (Rumpus interview).

From pie to octopi, Nezhukumatathil’s collection Lucky Fish (Tupelo, 2011) brims with a palpable, abiding wonder that urges us to smell the fruit bubbling from the buttery crust, dig our fingers into the earth, roll an eel stone in our palm, and refuse to let mosquitoes turn us away from the stars.

In “Pie Plate,” a red ceramic pie plate gifted by a nomadic friend inspires her:

[...] I love the promise of buttery crust and scoop
of fruit. I love what it smells like: home. Some
believe the turtle carries the whole weight
of the world. I want the turtle to put down

his pack tonight and join me at the table.
[...]

We glimpse the early blossoming of her wonder in “The Secret of Soil”:

[...]
The secret of soil is that it is alive--
a step in the forest means
you are carried on the back
of a thousand bugs. The secret

I give you is on page forty-two
of my old encyclopedia set.
I cut out all the pictures of minerals
and gemstones. I could not take

their beauty, could not swallow
that such stones live deep inside
the earth. I wanted to tape them
to my hands and wrists [...]

As I imagined the parents who nurtured her with her scissors and her digging, her father appeared in “Mosquitoes,” beckoning her to peer into a telescope.

[...] How I can’t go to school with bites all over

my face anymore, Dad. Now---I hardly
ever say no. He has plans to go star-gazing
with his grandson and for once, I don’t protest.
He has plans. I know one day he won’t ask me,

won’t be there to show me the rings of Saturn
glowing gold through the eyepiece. [...]

The attention and affection with which Nezhukumatathil engages the world persists wherever she travels. One of her writing practices is to keep an image journal that she likens to a commonplace book of earlier times (flyway interview). In “Kottayam Morning,” set in Kerala, India, her artfulness with image sparkles:

Four mornings here and each one
rings out with funeral and honk ::

green parrot and slender goat :: a clay dish
full of ghee. Saris tongue the wind,

trying to taste my grandmother’s
cinnamon plants and leafhopper wing.

Her metaphor for her disquietude amid this dazzling and dizzying environment? “A hundred bats fly inside my chest. // I hear them in my lung cave / when I am still.”

An equally vivid metaphor delighted me in “A Globe Is Just an Asterisk and Every Home Should Have an Asterisk”:  “I saw my neighbor’s lawn boiling // over with birds. Like the yard was a giant lasagna / and the birds were the perfectly bubbled cheese [...]”

Although her earlier collections, Miracle Fruit and At the Drive-in Volcano, glitter with wonder too, there is another attention alongside it here, a harder kind of wonder, a seeing and naming of things some would rather ignore.

Her poems about her newborn son and his birth convey fear and fierceness along with gratitude and awareness of her family’s place in the interdependent web. From “Toy Universe”...

There are stars that smell like licorice
and there are stars some children cannot see
because they are piecing together toy trains
and race cars and buses for my child. In the next
universe, let every moon cluster spin each child
a turn on a soda fountain stool [...]

And from “Birth Geographic”...

[...] let it be known that I will never leave you on my own accord. Never. If
someone takes me, I will scratch and bite until I gargle soil. My mouth will be
an angry mouth if anyone rips me from you. The center of my hands boiled
with blossoms when we made a family. I would never flee that garden. I swear
to you here and now: If I ever go missing, know that I am trying to come
home.
[...]

“Becoming a mom,” Nezhukumatathil revealed in an interview with Lantern Review, “has brought my heartbeat closer to the surface of my skin.” Perhaps this is one reason Lucky Fish reflects such a wide emotional range amid this familiar landscape of wonder.

Nezhukumatathil’s invention extends from her images and metaphors to her form, which includes playful uses of punctuation and lineation. There are no haibuns as there were in At the Drive-in Volcano.  Instead various hybrids of list poems abound - even one with footnotes (“How to be a Poet”).  

Introduce students to these poems for their joyfulness, for what they illustrate about close observation captured in the surprising image and the precise word, for the way they integrate mythology and science, and for the inventiveness they demonstrate with form. There’s also a reader’s companion for Lucky Fish available from Tupelo that might spark more ideas.

When asked how her poems happen, she answered “it always starts with an image or word that just sounds really beautiful in your mouth” (flyway interview), so whether you bring these poems into your living room or your classroom, remember to read them aloud - more than once.

When I finished reading William Notter’s Holding Everything Down (Southern Illinois UP, 2009), I longed to connect with the working people and landscapes of my growing-up years: uncles in bib overalls leaning against trucks, Aunt Eileen’s strawberry-rhubarb pie cooling on the counter, the chainsaw scent of morning in the woods with Dad. And despite the unlikely inclusion of meat on my plate these days, my stomach growled for sausage, biscuits, and gravy.

In this hardscrabble, heartfelt collection, Notter captures a deep connection to the land, as well as the connection between Midwestern people who live with nature’s unpredictability.   

“Morning News in the Big Horn Mountains” starts with the news that makes the papers - celebrity impropriety, global warming, and war - then shifts to local news of a different sort, revealing the speaker’s keen observance of nature’s wildness even as he tries to influence it.

In Wyoming, just below timberline,
meteors and lightning storms
keep us entertained at night. Last week,
a squirrel wrecked the mountain bluebirds' nest.
I swatted handfuls of moths in the cabin
and set them on a stump each day,
but the birds would not come back to feed.

As the poem moves toward the closing lines, this intertwining of human and natural world continues, sparking reflection about the cyclic, ephemeral quality of both.

Flakes of obsidian and red flint
knapped from arrowheads hundreds of years ago
appear in the trails each day,
and the big fish fossil in the limestone cliff
dissolves a little more with every rain.

In “The Ranch Woman's Secret,” it is the rancher’s actions the woman undoes. As he obsesses over coyotes that she knows haven't killed their cattle in years, she muses... "He'll start to wonder / where he put his seven-millimeter shells / and how his traps get sprung while he's in town / or hauling a load of hay to from Nebraska." 

While coyotes limit the geography where readers could imagine the ranch woman listening for the coyotes' wailing, the kids the speaker addresses in “Directions in the Nebraska Sandhills”  could represent kids in any rural place with dwindling options for making ends meet.

Ahead of them are shotguns, pheasant,
deer from groves along the Platte.
Then clumsiness with girls, the monotony
of tractors, raking hay.  They will hate Lakeside.
They will buy a pickup or souped-up car,
rumble off to Rapid City, Denver, anywhere

After this passage, Notter hones the poem's sense of place as the speaker praises the wide, stubborn beauty of the plains, a landscape he predicts will follow the kids to that anywhere.

In mountains they will wish for sunset
the way it looks past Alliance, nothing
but orange sky over all their families work for,
ponds like sheets of Depression glass,
trill of a fencepost meadowlark,
Angus in silhouette, more space
than anyone can stand until he leaves.

Other poems available online include “High Plains Farming,” “Jubilate,” and “Demolition Derby.” Some poems startled me, like the short series whose speaker is "the dead guy" who picks up dead animals from farms. Others unsettled me, like "The Trailer House on Bethel Road" in which a couple encounters tracings of the last family who lived there, evidence that makes them wonder "if rage could live on in a house."

Read Holding Everything Down for the memories it may stir and for the barren, gritty, and ruggedly beautiful places it takes you. Read it for the vivid, textured quality of Notter's precise diction and imagery. Share his poems with students, friends, or cousins who may find themselves in its dusty, grease-stained lines.