DON'T LET ME BE LONELY

A 20th-anniversary reissue of Rankine’s 2004 reckoning with post-9/11 America.

In her introduction to this new edition, the author frames her prose-poems as the first panel of a triptych completed by Citizen and Just Us—altogether, a cleareyed but plainly infuriated study of American injustice. Revisiting it now is a reminder of how much we are still living with the tragedies of the past 20 years. Rankine’s subjects include James Byrd Jr., the Black man brutally murdered by three White men who dragged him behind their pickup; Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times by New York police; the ever-expanding world of big pharma; domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh; strife between Israel and Palestine; viral diseases like SARS; and 9/11, especially then–New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s flag-waving response to it. Throughout, as she writes in the introduction, her goal was to wrestle with the assertion “that politics have no place in poems," a posture she calls "self-erasure.” Her approach to these issues can be intimate, as Rankine shares her personal medical history and contemplates her anxiety over the state of the world and struggle to connect with it. But her chief rhetorical mode is declamatory: The author suggests that many of our current political divides are a function of our collectively talking past each other, unwilling to address the racial and political challenges Americans face. “It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex,” she writes. “Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex.” The lyricism the subtitle refers to speaks to the fluidity of her subjects as well as the elegiac tone she brings to each one.

The topics have changed, but the struggle Rankine provocatively outlines is grimly persistent.