words.
"Citizen is not about systemic racism or police brutality — not directly. It instead charts the accumulation of racist moments in the lives of black citizens, and how these moments, over time, express themselves on black bodies. It also considers what is possible for black life — what can be seen, said, heard, tasted, or smelled — when its only options are invisibility or hypervisibility in a white world. With the turn of each page, it burns the reader with terrible intimations of racial hatred delivered in prose stanzas that appear to have been cut with a razor. It is simple, like a bruise.
...More than that: it demands to be read and discussed now, in the current moment, when, in Ferguson and elsewhere, the daily struggles of black life are being thrown onto a background that is all too white."
FLAVORWIRE: Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen’ Should Win the National Book Award for Poetry
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