CITIZEN by Claudia Rankine

Part poetry, part essay, part art book, CITIZEN by Claudia Rankine is like none other, recounting racial aggressions and ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. This year the book turns ten, but its potency remains. Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society. 

Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry - Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry - Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism - Winner of the NAACP Image Award - Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize - Winner of the PEN Open Book Award 

ONE OF THE BEST 2014 BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29

- Recommended by Tess