January 17, 2017 (vol. 127, iss. 9) • Page Image 1
…According to author Claudia Rankine, the inception of her book-length poem, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” began with the question: “How did that happen?” Something of an investigation, the poem opens with secondhand prose poetry cataloguing the lived experience of racism among Rankine’s friends and colleagues. “I just wanted to see if people were sensitive to the fact that every day in small ways, they were themselves engage...…