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by Claudia Rankine
A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us.
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, "collapse" takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.
Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. "No matter our posture," Rankine writes, "we are all among the rubble." This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.
"Rankine is one of the most eloquent and incisive poets and essayists of the contemporary Black American experience...A remarkable, soul-stirring work." —Booklist (starred review)
"An innovative, genre-defying mix of narrative and criticism...[Rankine] demonstrates how a complicated friendship can force self-reflection and change. It's a thought-provoking response to a broken world." —Publishers Weekly
"A celebrated poet asks how to live...Illustrated with politically resonant artworks, Rankine's lyrical melding of memoir and criticism poses urgent questions." —Kirkus Reviews
"Triage is a stunning book. In this blend of essay, memoir, fabulation, and criticism, the intimate encounters between the narrator and the theorist offer an extended meditation on the collective devastation of the present. The body bears the weight of this brutality and violence and collapses under the burden of all that we are forced to carry. To yield, to break down is a self-interruption and a letting go, a gesture of survival. The collapse is the embodiment of our shared desolation, an act of dwelling with the tombless and the unwept, a recognition of our destitution. The beauty of Rankine's dense, elliptical sentences guides us through this ruination." ―Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
This information about Triage was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.
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