Keynote
A new edition of the first groundbreaking installment in Claudia Rankine’s American trilogy
Book Title
Don't Let Me Be Lonely
Subtitle
An American Lyric
Cover Image
- “Rankine has graced us not only with her presence, but the ability to make ourselves present—to separate our consciousness from the droning media that drowns out life’s possibilities.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Poem Excerpt
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes
me the saddest. The sadness is not really about
George W. or our American optimism; the
sadness lives in the recognition that a life can
not matter.
—from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
me the saddest. The sadness is not really about
George W. or our American optimism; the
sadness lives in the recognition that a life can
not matter.
—from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Body
A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the visual, Rankine negotiates the enduring anxieties of medicated depression, race riots, divisive elections, terrorist attacks, and ongoing wars—doom scrolling through the daily news feeds that keep us glued to our screens and that have come to define our age.
First published in 2004, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a hauntingly prescient work, one that has secured a permanent place in American literature. This new edition is presented in full color with updated visuals and text, including a new preface by the author, and matches the composition of Rankine’s best-selling and award-winning Citizen and Just Us as the first book in her acclaimed American trilogy.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a crucial guide to surviving a fractured and fracturing American consciousness—a book of rare and vital honesty, complexity, and presence.
First published in 2004, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a hauntingly prescient work, one that has secured a permanent place in American literature. This new edition is presented in full color with updated visuals and text, including a new preface by the author, and matches the composition of Rankine’s best-selling and award-winning Citizen and Just Us as the first book in her acclaimed American trilogy.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a crucial guide to surviving a fractured and fracturing American consciousness—a book of rare and vital honesty, complexity, and presence.
List Price
$20.00
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About the Author
Credit: Andrew Zuckerman / The Slowdown
Praise
- “I don’t know of a book of poems that so unabashedly, startlingly, successfully partakes of this contemporary combination of turbulence and torpor. It’s consuming to read, engulfing. Raw.”—Pleiades
- “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely articulates the unsettling possibility of moving from spectatorship to solidarity, with all the urgency that this task demands. This is vital poetry.”—The Brooklyn Rail
- “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a book that refuses the safe distance of being a spectator to the lives of others—as well as to our own.”—The Rumpus
- “Elegant and eloquent…[Rankine] holds up a mirror (the mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet?) and what we see there can be chilling indeed.”—American Book Review
