Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine
In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century. 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 cannot matter. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.
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"Because the foundations for loneliness begin in the dreamscapes you create. Their resemblance to reality reflects disappointment first."
A poignant examination of grief, loss, and the United States that emerged after 9/11. Utilizing prose poetry, essays, and cultural criticism, Rankine creates a form of intimacy based on the utterly familiar feeling of loneliness and how we, as individuals, wage a battle against it. One of the most (ironically) enjoyable reads of the semester, mostly because I related to it on a deeper level.
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