Reviews

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

nuhafariha's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative reflective fast-paced

4.25

Thanks Greywolf Press and Netgalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy.

Now available.

First penned in the aftermath of 9/11, Don't Let Me Be Lonely is a deep and disturbing look into the American psyche. Through personal and fictive essays, news excerpts, research studies, and TV snippets, Rankine looks at the violence of the US empire both at home and abroad. Compared to her previous books, this one feels both broader in terms of themes explored and narrower in scope of time. This is one book that will keep revealing new depths each time you read.

sleepyllamasciencegirl's review against another edition

5.0

There are so many things I could say about this collection, specifically as an “American lyric” like the byline indicates, but one of the things I keep returning to is how crazy the discussion of 9/11 is given it was published in 2004 at a time where like tenured professors could lose their jobs for not falling head over heals for US interventionism & imperialism. Also, love how Rankine intervenes and problematizes the ~field of the visual~, which is to say how violence, and specifically anti-black violence implicitly animated complex libidinal relations ranging from interpersonal microagressions to the concrete and structural violence of the state (see her crazy reading of Hegel just slapped in the middle lmao)

rogermckenzie's review against another edition

5.0

Just brilliant! I could flower this up a little but will inevitably just come back to the same - just brilliant!

quenchgum's review against another edition

5.0

"Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated or loved."

mscoleman's review against another edition

reflective

4.0

katemck1's review against another edition

5.0

Borrowed a copy. I shall buy my own since I will be rereading and rereading this excellent book.

dukegregory's review against another edition

4.0

It's about television and mass media and, as such, is now about the internet and mass media via metaphor, and this provokes a discourse on the isolating disconnect between the seen and the experienced, the very contemporary state of political paralysis that comes when you realize that, though a verb, witnessing is not action. History swirls around you (Carl Phillips recently wrote, "the air stirs like history/like the future/like history") and renders you unremembered, yet you remain and act and process haply. Wars waged, pharmaceuticals conjured, and distance widened, deaths accrued, and loneliness overtakes solitude, internal or otherwise. It all makes one's heart and skin appear petrous.

mindthebook's review against another edition

4.0

I samband med Booker Prize-nomineringen ombads Sara Stridsberg ge några läsrekommendationer (i tidskriften Modern Psykologi, möjligen?) och det här var en av författarna som nämndes, ny för mig. Många beröringspunkter mellan dessa två samhällskommenterande författare med drömlik, bildrik, fragmentarisk och samtidigt isande skarp prosa.

Under samma period lyssnade jag på podcasten '10 things that scare me' och den har också många gemensamma drag med Rankine, märkligt nog. Korta episoder, som dröjer sig kvar - och av stort sociologiskt intresse.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/10-things-scare-me

ancohen84's review against another edition

3.0

This was my first experience reading a lyrical essay, minus some Bukowski. That is all.

isaacb's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

3.5