In-person tickets are sold out, but you can join the livestream from anywhere in the world. Claudia Rankines Citizen, An American Lyric (2015) problematizes the notion of citizenship through theory-laden poetical prose, images, and video scripts.

Rankine will be at the shop to discuss the book, and her work more widely, with Nicola Rollock, on Tuesday 14 March. Claudia Rankine’s poems explore how to write about yourself when your language pretends you don’t exist. Williams is a particularly apt muse since tennis and its associated values figure in Tony Hoaglands poem The Change, to which Rankine wrote a critical. Plot, an early work exploring pregnancy and childbirth, is published for the first time in the UK this month by Penguin. This fearless poet extends American poetry in invigorating new directions.’ She writes unapologetically about racism in the United States, making palpable. Poet Mark Doty has written of her: ‘Claudia Rankine’s formally inventive poems investigate many kinds of boundaries: the unsettled territory between poetry and prose, between the word and the visual image, between what it’s like to be a subject and the ways we’re defined from outside by skin colour, economics and global corporate culture. Rankines words touch you, whether she is writing about alienation or intimacy. Her tendency to mix genres led her 2014 book Citizen to be nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in both poetry and criticism categories. Our Author of the Month for March is the Jamaican-born American poet and essayist Claudia Rankine.

Claudia rankine poems