This month, Graywolf Press reissued Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. The twenty years since its first publication are contextualized in a brilliant intro by Rankine. While she was then engaging with terrorism, George W’s wars, and race riots, the book, sadly, holds to be as relevant today—even more so. “I stop watching the news. I want to continue, watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope.” She is writing about the reelection of Bush, but she could as easily be writing about the pandemic or any of the other tragedies that have followed. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo. The personal is political and the political is personal. And Rankine is able to make it a lyric. It was interesting to read in her introduction that Richard Howard first identified the poems in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely as “lyric.” I was mesmerized re-reading this first in her lyric trilogy. It holds up—and I only wish it felt more like history than our ongoing present.
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Author: Denise Duhamel
