Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” Wins Forward Poetry Prize

In March at Tweetspeak Poetry, I had a series of articles on the poetry collections nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. One of those collections was Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, a series of prose poems on what it means to be Black in contemporary America.

Claudia Rankine

Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best poetry collection. Monday night in London, Citizen was also selected as the winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for best poetry collection. The prizes kick off the London Literary Festival, which goes on for two weeks and includes readings, lectures, book signings, and other literary events.

Rankine’s work is powerful. As I said in the review at Tweetspeak Poetry, you don’t read a collection like Citizen and remain unchanged.  

Related: My review of Citizen at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Claudia Rankine and “Citizen”

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.