Description: A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us
Brief description: Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.
Review Quotes:
"Rankine is a literary icon, so it's no surprise that she's found ways to blend genres and formats into her next book. . . . Rankine explores the backdrop of violence that has only intensified in recent years, as well as the love that keeps us together in emotionally numbing times."--Harper's Bazaar, "The 25 Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2026"
"The ever genre-fluid Rankine braids criticism, memoir and more in this illustrated story of two women whose lives diverge and reconverge over decades."--The New York Times Book Review, "The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026"
"Claudia Rankine is fearless. . . . We need her."--Los Angeles Times, "20 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2026"
"An innovative, genre-defying mix of narrative and criticism. . . . [Rankine] demonstrates how a complicated friendship can force self-reflection and change. It's a thought-provoking response to a broken world."--Publishers Weekly
"Triage is a stunning book. In this blend of essay, memoir, fabulation, and criticism, the intimate encounters between the narrator and the theorist offer an extended meditation on the collective devastation of the present. The body bears the weight of this brutality and violence and collapses under the burden of all that we are forced to carry. To yield, to break down is a self-interruption and a letting go, a gesture of survival. The collapse is the embodiment of our shared desolation, an act of dwelling with the tombless and the unwept, a recognition of our destitution. The beauty of Rankine's dense, elliptical sentences guides us through this ruination."--Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments "Triage is transfixing. What Claudia Rankine achieves here seems almost impossible, utterly daring, and full of risk. This book is a masterwork, faultless and taut, that stitches together a fractured, aching world with precise and subtle language that refuses to ever falter under the weight of the profundity of her conclusions. It is as if we are watching Rankine balance on a tightrope that transgresses the grief of being alive in a world where so many buckle. She asks us to regard the enormous pain of those we consider to be our 'Other' and also recall the people we have left behind in what we hope might be our now evanescent past lives. Here her genius returns home and takes on the deepest questions of our spirits and the time we live in."--Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah "Claudia Rankine's remarkable, outstanding odyssey--an account of our present, which is also our past, which is always our future--is beautifully rendered in a kaleidoscope of images and sensations. This book rewards the reader with the sense that life, as we encounter it day in, day out, often leaves us with the certainty that words are only the beginning and maybe they might never be enough. Triage is exquisite and, frankly, it is at this moment important--for this moment is always right now."--Jamaica Kincaid, author of A Small Place "At the center of Triage is a ritual of collapse and tentative recovery, of giving way and getting back up. In Claudia Rankine's writing, we feel traditional genres buckle under the catastrophes of the present--and then she shows us how new possibilities of form and feeling might emerge. There are no false consolations in this book, but there is the rare and quickening sense that our language, our literature, has been enlarged."--Ben Lerner, author of Transcription