Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including 'Citizen: An American Lyric' and 'Don’t Let Me Be Lonely' two plays including 'The White Card,' which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and 'Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue' as well as numerous video collaborations. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.ĭon't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.Ĭlaudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. or our American optimism the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter.

The sadness is not really about George W.

In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century.

Don t let me be lonely claudia rankine