Works by
Claudia Rankine
(Poet)
[1963 - ]

As Editor

• American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007), Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell, eds

• Gulf Coast-A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts-Winter Spring 2007 (Volume 19 #1) (2007), Claudia Rankine and Nick Flynn, eds.

• Gulf Coast a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts (Summer Fall 2006, Volume 18) , Claudia Rankine and Nick Flynn, eds.

• American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr, eds.

Poetry

• Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004)
  In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century
  
  I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes
  me the saddest. The sadness is not really about
  George W. or our American optimism; the
  sadness lives in the recognition that a life can
  not matter.
  
  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. 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.
  
  Don'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.

• Plot (2001)
  Her third collection of poetry, Claudia Rankine's Plot is original and enchanting, and the language, as in her acclaimed The End of the Alphabet, never ceases to startle and confront. Plot is a postmodern dialogue about pregnancy and childbirth. Liv, the expectant mother, and her husband, Erland, find themselves propelled into one of our most basic plots -- boy loves girl, girl gets pregnant. Liv's respect for life, however, makes her reluctant to bring a new life into the world. The couple's electrifying journey is charted through dreams, conversations, and reflections. A text like no other, it crosses genres, existing at times in poetry, at times in dialogue and prose, in order to arrive at new life and baby Ersatz. This stunning, avant-garde performance enacts what it means to be human, and to invest in humanity.

• The End of the Alphabet (1998)
  These poems-intrepid, obsessive, and erotic-tell the story of a woman's attempt to reconcile despair. Beginning near the end and then traveling back to a time before her disquiet, The End of the Alphabet is about living despite one's alienation from the self. Claudia Rankine, whose first collection was the prize-winning Nothing in Nature is Private, creates a transfixing testimonial to a woman facing her own disease. Unflinching in detail, Rankine examines the silent moment, freezes it, listens for the dislocation of language, and writes with a bewitching ear for beauty and violence: "Her voice . . . held back / as she peeled her face off, ran her hand / over its last expression." In another poem the memory and promise of invulnerability is described: "Imagine his unshaven face, his untrimmed nails as all / the hurt this world could give."
  
  Drawing on voices from Jane Eyre to Lady MacBeth, Rankine welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque, courting paradox into the center of her voice. Whether writing about intimacy or alienation, what remains long after, in searing echo, is this voice-its beguiling cadence and vivid physicality. There is an unprotected quality to this writing, as if each word has been pushed out along the precipice, daring us to go with it. Rankine's power lies in the intoxicating pull of that dare.
  
  Beyond all else, these poems will leave the reader changed, for The End of the Alphabet is the work of one of the most intriguing voices in contemporary poetry.

• Nothing in Nature Is Private (1994) -- Winner 1993 First Place Cleveland State University Poetry Center's International Poetry Competition