by Holly Cian
July 9, 2024
Holly Cian holds a B.A. in creative writing from the College of Charleston and an M.A. in literature from Western Carolina University. Her poems have been published in Pinesong, the Great Smokies Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, The Lindenwood Review, and in the anthology Witness: Appalachia to Hatteras. She lives in Asheville, N.C.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine; Graywolf Press; 200 pages; $20.00.
Claudia Rankine’s 2024 re-release of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric from Graywolf Press offers readers a familiar thread of events of the early 2000s, including 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the infamous anthrax scare, and personal moments in Rankine’s life. The collection, updated into color, plush with photos, and with pages framed by television sets, comes to us complete with prose pieces, lyrics, and images woven together to create Rankine’s American song. Readers who remember the events of the early 2000s will find an uncanny similarity between how those events made us feel then and how the events of today can often seem to feel so similarly experienced.
June’s release comes in the midst of Americans watching on their own television sets the tragic conflict in Gaza and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Death is a theme that pervades the piece from the beginning. Rankine begins, “There is a time I could say no one I knew well had died.” This statement struck me because I, too, had once had this thought in childhood. Such is the universality of death, and many of the experiences surrounding it, and such begins Rankine’s dive into the shared experiences of the American story.
In the earliest pages of the collection Rankine confronts her understanding of death but asks: at what point is one dead? Am I dead now? Who else do I know is dead? Rankine asks these questions to get at the feeling of limbo prevalent in many moments in life. At one poignant point, Rankine describes her concern for the fate of the actors, particularly those in old films, as she was a child. She then moves into a discussion of cancer (when are you dead, at death or at the missed diagnosis?) and then Alzheimer’s. She uses questions to blur the lines between life and death. Memory, perception, and a sense of confusion and subsequent helplessness continue to be emotions invoked throughout the collection.
Rankine wisely and beautifully titles her piece an American lyric. Her voice becomes a collective voice of the American public but also stands alone at the most poignant times to represent the voices of those without privilege. The experiences she poses range from that of being Black to that of being the close friend of a cancer patient, and to being an American glued to the television screen or glue to Newsweek looking for answers that didn’t seem real. There is a vulnerability in every experience including the death and illness Rankine touches on through many of the piece’s early half. It’s as if vulnerability itself is a part of the American story. Even the billboard on the front cover, over the field of wildflowers by an empty highway dressed with road signs, is starkly American and feels just as vulnerable. And what more vulnerable statement is there than “don’t let me be lonely?” Rankine’s treatment of vulnerability makes the book especially empathic to the American story, calling out moments of which we can all relate.
The index following the lyric expands nearly a third of the collection’s entirety and is as essential to the piece as the lyric itself. It should also serve as a reminder that discovery is just as much a part of our American story. Topics in the index enhance the lyrics but spill into their own stories. What begins as a brief biography of Mahalia Jackson’s influence on gospel becomes a narrative of her subsequent part in civil rights activism. We are given definitions on naturalism and petrous, followed by a Google search for “rape” and “statistics” in 2003. These are only a few of many examples of information woven into the index; I found the definitions to be an important contextual piece for the work as a whole. Rankine makes an interesting choice in choosing these words, as naturalism refers to the attention to detail that can make an image or story more realistic. To pair it with two very harsh and startling words, and then with statistics (through which reality is often portrayed), Rankine points out that even information we trust can be manipulated. In turn, the inability to completely trust the information we are given makes us more vulnerable, further fueling the vicious cycle Rankine attempts to dissect in her work.
Rankine’s book is undeniable for anyone looking to find comfort and belonging in a vulnerable world of tragedy and loss.
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Claudia Rankine Finds Music in Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
POETRY REVIEW
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