![]() ![]() How, Rankine asked, can Black citizens claim the expressive “I” of lyric poetry when a systemically racist state looks upon a Black person and sees, at best, a walking symbol of its greatest fears and, at worst, nothing at all? The book’s cover, a picture of David Hammons’s 1993 sculpture In the Hood, depicted a hood shorn from its sweatshirt-an image that evoked the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin. The book-length poem-the only such work to be a best seller on the New York Times nonfiction list-was in tune with the Black Lives Matter movement, which was then gathering momentum. ![]() Louis County grand jury decided not to charge Darren Wilson for Michael Brown’s murder, critics hailed it as a work very much of its moment. W hen Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric arrived in the fall of 2014, shortly before a St. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |