![]() ![]() In addition-vis-à-vis its selection for citywide reading programs and school curricula across the country-the book has been widely engaged as an instructive, empathy-generating vehicle that ostensibly explains, per its New York Times review headline, "How It Feels to Be Black in America" (Bass). An instant omnipresence on bestseller charts, award shortlists, college syllabi, and bookstore tables, Citizen has since been considered by scholarly and popular critics as lyric poetry, as black experimental poetry, as documentary, and as image-text. However, the book's message was amplified by the #BlackLivesMatter movement following the deaths of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, among others, and captured readers' attention in a moment when grief and outrage over racism's deadly toll sought collective outlet in cultural forms. ![]() Citizen insists that anti-blackness persists everywhere, every day in America, making the devastating case that there was nothing unusual about the number of unarmed African Americans killed by police in the months surrounding its release in fall 2014. Depicting violent, exhausting, and iterative experiences of African American racial interpellation through the striking use of second-person address, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric has been praised by readers as "brilliant, disabusing" (Chiasson) "a dazzling expression of the painful double consciousness of black life in America" (Lindgren) and "necessary in every sense of the word" (Gay). ![]()
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