The disturbing subject matter the narrative, documentation style and the level-headed, analytical approach and tone is where I believe Rankine brings her strengths as a writer. Her voice is authentic in its recounting of racist moments and the conflicts of questioning the status quo when the racism is insidious and obfuscated.

The poems hang together in a ‘lyrical’ way and have a building, operatic crescendo as the collection progressed. While I wasn’t always stunned by her poetic language or technical craft of line, I found the Citizen poems connected well as her first-person narratives built a case against racism. While the poetry of Rankine is not heavily scribed with coded symbolism and psychologically-associative imagery to insinuate her poem’s meanings, her prosaic, wise stanzas are free-flow narratives of varying sizes (minus line breaking, mostly) with a first-person/diary-entry voice and style. I found Citizen to be one of the most important contemporary poetry collections I have read as it relates to the conversation women’s literature creates around addressing micro-aggression, marginalization, and racism in the United States in the 21 st Century. Poet Claudia Rankine penned an arresting, courageous body of work about racism with her book Citizen: An American Lyric (2013).

Citizen a lyric