Citizen Impression

When I began reading Citizen: An American Lyric I really did not know what to expect. When we briefly discussed the content in class I was expecting some form of poetry. Citizen was definitely a challenging piece of literature but I appreciate the content and the styles used by the great Claudia Rankine. The way many parts of the book appear and are written is actually appealing because not all pages are completely taken up which appealed more to my eye, and therefore kept the reader interested and intrigued.

From the moment you get into the book, it appears like most books I’ve opened before, paragraph after paragraph, but it’s the content which made me keep reading. I often find myself reminiscing of the past so I was interested in seeing where the opening poem was going. I was hesitant to keep on going with it because it seemed like it wasn’t going to get any more interesting, but I was wrong, and I’m glad I was. As the book continues, the poems begin to appear different. Some pieces are brief lines and appear to look like simple poems, but the poems can contain intense content. I quickly realized that these poems were in a sense related but not necessarily similar.

The pieces in the Citizen without a doubt evoked emotions in me when reading them. It’s not easy living through any kind of hardships or harassment or unfair treatment or racism, but its even harder having to write about these experiences in such elegant and complex ways. There were plenty of areas where I had to go back and read multiple times. Some pieces are written in a way which was a little confusing but I would like to think that they are written that way to make you really look at it and analyze it, that’s the only way to really understand what the poem is about. I can’t help but remember the poems which talk about the past. There was a line in part five on page 72 which says, the past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow, that’s so true.

Its important to be challenged every now and then, and great pieces of literature can definitely do that to you. Rankine’s work was very impressive and totally fits today’s society, from the cover of the black hood, to the content of the stories, to the images used within the book, it’s a great challenge.