The
fifth nominated work for the National Book
Critics Circle Award
for poetry is Citizen: An American Lyric
by Claudia Rankine. It is as different from the other nominated works as they
are from themselves.
Perhaps
the most striking difference is that most of the poems in Citizen are prose poems, and they are generally untitled. As such,
they assume the character of small stories with large themes – one large theme,
actually, better described as one story with running scenes illustrating the
theme. And that theme is what it means to an African-American in contemporary
America.
The
poems of Citizen are not easy poems
to read.
To
continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
No comments:
Post a Comment