The End of the Alphabet
Poems
Published on 20. November 2018
113 pages
978-0-8021-9853-2 (ISBN)
Description
A "harrowing and hallucinogenic" collection of poems from author of the
New York Times-bestselling National Book Award-finalist
Citizen: An American Lyric (
Library Journal).
Claudia Rankine's book-length poem about rising racial tensions in America, Citizen: An American Lyric, won numerous prizes, including the The National Book Critic's Circle Award. Her new collection of poems-intrepid, obsessive, and erotic-tell the story of a woman's attempt to reconcile herself to her own despair.
Drawing on voices from Jane Eyre to Lady MacBeth, Rankine welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque. Whether writing about intimacy or alienation, what remains long after is her singular voice-its beguiling cadence and vivid physicality. There is an unprotected quality to this writing, as if each word has been pushed out along the precipice, daring us to go with it. Rankine's power lies in the intoxicating pull of that dare.
From one of contemporary poetry's most powerful and provocative authors, The End of the Alphabetis a work where "wits at once keen and tenacious match themselves against grief's genius" ( Boston Review).
Claudia Rankine's book-length poem about rising racial tensions in America, Citizen: An American Lyric, won numerous prizes, including the The National Book Critic's Circle Award. Her new collection of poems-intrepid, obsessive, and erotic-tell the story of a woman's attempt to reconcile herself to her own despair.
Drawing on voices from Jane Eyre to Lady MacBeth, Rankine welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque. Whether writing about intimacy or alienation, what remains long after is her singular voice-its beguiling cadence and vivid physicality. There is an unprotected quality to this writing, as if each word has been pushed out along the precipice, daring us to go with it. Rankine's power lies in the intoxicating pull of that dare.
From one of contemporary poetry's most powerful and provocative authors, The End of the Alphabetis a work where "wits at once keen and tenacious match themselves against grief's genius" ( Boston Review).
More details
Person
CLAUDIA RANKINE is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Content
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- The End of the Alphabet
- Overview is a place
- Elsewhere, things tend
- Testimonial
- Toward biography
- Hunger to the table
- Extent and root of
- Residual in the hour
- Dirtied up
- Where is the sea?
- Cast away moan
- In this sense, beyond
- The quotidian
