I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes
me the saddest. The sadness is not really about
George W. or our American optimism; the
sadness lives in the recognition that a life can
not matter.
Award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multi-genre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while always arguing that complex thinking is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.
Don't Let Me Be Lonely
is an important new confrontation with our culture right now, with a voice at its heart bewildered by the anxieties of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.
Credit: Andrew Zuckerman / The Slowdown
Claudia Rankine is the author of
Just Us: An American Conversation
,
Citizen: An American Lyric
and four previous books, including
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
. Her work has appeared recently in the
Guardian
, the
New York Times Book Review
, the
New York Times Magazine
, and the
Washington Post
. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of
Poets & Writers
. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine teaches at New York University.
http://claudiarankine.com/
More by author
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“I don’t know of a book of poems that so unabashedly, startlingly, successfully partakes of this contemporary combination of turbulence and torpor. It’s consuming to read, engulfing. Raw.”
—
Pleiades
-
“
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
articulates the unsettling possibility of moving from spectatorship to solidarity, with all the urgency that this task demands. This is vital poetry.”
—
The Brooklyn Rail
-
“
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
is a book that refuses the safe distance of being a spectator to the lives of others—as well as to our own.”
—
The Rumpus
-
“Page after page,
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
offers a staggering record of a response to the media before and after 9/11 beyond anything the Department of Veterans Affairs foresaw.”
—
NYFA
