Similarly, when she describes meeting a novelist in London, she does not reveal his provenance. Rankine’s Jamaican origins are withheld – no mention of her roots on the cover. Through brief encounters and troubling retellings of recent news, Rankine puts one, as a white reader, on constant alert for any unconscious racism in oneself.Įven the way the book has been published is bracingly correct. Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle poetry award in the US in recognition, partly, of the shocking truth it tells.

She eavesdrops on America and a racism that has never gone away. Pauline T.C laudia Rankine’s book may or may not be poetry – the question becomes insignificant as one reads on. Her achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an unsettled hybrid – her writing on the hard shoulder of prose.

Strong on Summer Reading Series: “Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning”

Patricia Wilson on Summer Reading Series: So You Want to Talk About Race.

Sarah Ropp on Summer Reading Series: So You Want to Talk About Race.

See our calendar on the left sidebar for more information.Įxcerpt from “What the Body Told” by Rafael Campo ApClare Callahan Leave a comment Campo will deliver a public lecture called “Training the Eye, Hearing the Heart: Art, Poetry, and Healing” on April 21st at 12pm at the Blanton Museum of Art, sponsored by the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies, with support from the Humanities Institute. “Please, doctor, can you heal me?”Įxcerpt from “Illness as Muse” by Rafael Campo, poet, essayist, and physician. Soon enough, my patients start to arrive, and the way they want me to understand what they are feeling only immerses me more deeply in language’s compelling alchemy: “The pain is like a cold, bitter wind blowing through my womb,” murmurs a young infertile woman from Guatemala with what I have diagnosed much less eloquently as chronic pelvic pain. Of course, the next morning always comes and I find myself in my clinic again, the exam room speaking aloud in all of its blatant metaphors-the huge clock above where my patients sit implacably measuring lifetimes the space itself narrow and compressed as a sonnet-and immediately I’m back to thinking about writing.

Claudia rankine an american lyric