It's challenging to put into words what makes this book so captivating. It teeters between the realms of essay and poetry, with beautiful, sometimes haunting, language. Something on nearly every page made me stop and think. Can't recommend this highly enough.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 24, 2024

This month, Graywolf Press reissued Claudia Rankine’s Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. The twenty years since its first publication are contextualized in a brilliant intro by Rankine. While she was then engaging with terrorism, George W’s wars, and race riots, the book, sadly, holds to be as relevant today—even more so. “I stop watching the news. I want to continue, watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope.” She is writing about the reelection of Bush, but she could as easily be writing about the pandemic or any of the other tragedies that have followed. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo. The personal is political and the political is personal. And Rankine is able to make it a lyric. It was interesting to read in her introduction that Richard Howard first identified the poems in Don't Let Me Be Lonely as “lyric.” I was mesmerized re-reading this first in her lyric trilogy. It holds up—and I only wish it felt more like history than our ongoing present.

Rankine is such a unique talent. I love reading her for her analysis and her formal brilliance. Worth reading.

An essential link in Rankine’s work that has been somewhat difficult to find over the years. As Rankine writes in the new preface, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is the first in the loosely linked trilogy that was followed by the more well-known Citizen (also subtitled An American Lyric) and Just Us (subtitled An American Conversation). Written at the turn of the century, this book remains unfortunately prescient. I’m glad it will be more available to readers of Rankine and beyond.

3.75 star

I read an ebook copy of this from NetGalley, and it was one of those scenarios where the format hurt the experience. There lacked distinguished spacing to indicate where one poem ended and the next began and thus read like a long stream of consciousness which I didn’t love. I also did not realize there were notes at the back of the book which went with several of the poems! This would’ve been amazing to have right before or after those poems and truly would’ve added depth to the experience. I would absolutely re-read this in print and think my rating would be higher.

I could see the overall theme of loneliness throughout the whole novel and loved how expansive the author went with the theme. Claudia Rankine often writes through a political lens and her passion shines through. So many of these poems had be digging deep and really turning over the complex situations she presented. I love how her work makes me think. There were poems in this selection which I didn’t quite get, but some of that may have been reader fatigue due to the formatting struggles I had. I’d be curious to see this in print to evaluate if it has more distinct separation of poems or if it is printed the same.