Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship” to Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt during the 2006 World Cup final. Like Rankine’s last book, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” (2004), which shares its subtitle, “Citizen” is part documentary, part lyric procedural, submitting to its painstaking frame-by-frame analysis everything from J. M. “Citizen,” which has been short-listed for the National Book Award, suggests that a contemporary “American lyric” is a weave of artfully juxtaposed intensities, a quarrel within form about form. Rankine has called it an attempt to “pull the lyric back into its realities.” Those realities include the acts of everyday racism-remarks, glances, implied judgments-that flourish in an environment where more explicit acts of discrimination have been outlawed.
The poet Claudia Rankine’s new volume, her fifth, is “Citizen: An American Lyric” (Graywolf), a book-length poem about race and the imagination. Claudia Rankine Illustration by Patrick Morgan / Reference from Margarita Corporan
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