Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric Reviews

• 
  Roxane

  If I could, I would give this book ten stars. It is an amazing, lyrical meditation on loneliness, death, and American after 9/11 with an interesting thread throughout about pharmaceuticals and mental health. This is a superlative book of prose poetry. I found myself marking nearly every page with an idea or moment or phrase I never want to forget.
  
  
• 
  julieta

  It felt to me like a performance about many things. I think it is because of the pictures, or something about mixing media that makes it complete to me. It's about life, sickness, death, politics, family, there are so many more things, and it's written in poetic, or beautiful fragments, but it kept me wondering which way it was going. I finished feeling like I had had an experience. And I loved it.
• 
  Julie Ehlers

  Don't Let Me Be Lonely was published 14 years ago but still feels so timely. It's mainly about pharmaceuticals and life in the United States after 9/11, which sounds a bit random, but it ends up exploring the intersection of the personal and political quite well. Remarkably, it also foreshadows our current moment, providing some amazing insights on how we got to where we are now. If I had one complaint it's that there could have been a bit more unity among all of these short pieces, but frankly there are probably connections that I missed the first time around. I look forward to reading this again and making some new discoveries.
• 
  Lauren

  I came to Rankine's work through Citizen: An American Lyric and it was one of the best books I read in 2016. Don't Let Me Be Lonely, written a decade earlier, was very similar in style - prescient, quirky, and jaw-dropping - but didn't carry the same "oompf" for me as Citizen.
  
  Still worth all 5 stars - a time capsule of the years right after 9/11, and a running thread of mental health, pharmaceutical treatments, and a family crisis - but hard for me to rate as high as the later work - maybe that makes Citizen a 10-star.
• 
  S. Donovan

  As a literary genre still fighting for an ironic legitimacy, prose poetry received a Hail Mary the length of Doug Flutie's 1986 game-winning touchdown pass when Claudia Rankine published this book.
  
  Not since I first discovered Baudelaire or Carolyn Forché have I felt I understood what "real" or "good" prose poetry is, or could become, until reading "Don't Let Me Be Lonely."
  
  Many L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/prose poetry authors once railed against the rigidity and creative bankruptcy of a standardized academic system which "by its nature stultifies creativity and the free expression of poetry." A system which employs many of said poets now and through which many publish their work. Some debate whether "prose poetry" even exists a form, i.e., with structural guidelines and conventions.
  
  The difficult thing about prose poetry is that it straddles the fence between poetry and prose, pushing the defined boundaries of both. (Among other liberties James Frey, contemporary master of the fictional memoir, took, he stole a stylistic note from prose poetry.
  
  Rankine blends poetic lyrics, essay-writing, and television stills in this politically charged masterpiece. Reading "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" is like watching someone throw carbonic acid onto a Maya Angelou or Zora Neale Huston novel: the traditional form of prose has dissolved into an imagistic stream of consciousness, which reflects the narrator's dissolving sense of self. The prose form allows her to create a tumbling, open narrative at once unified and diverse.
  
  Rankine's passages are frightfully alive, her cadence gorgeous. The words leap off the page into the mouth, pulling on the tongue until they are spoken aloud. She seems a natural heir to powerful African-American/Caribbean oral traditions. The same spoken traditions that have given rise to modern cultural achievements such as the Black Arts literary movement, the Blues, Hip-Hop and Rap, Gospel/Soul, and Jazz, are hard at work in Claudia Rankine's unique voice.
• 
  Viv JM

  This is a really hard book to describe. It lies somewhere between essay and poetry. The themes are those of grief, death, toxicity, medication, race, bewilderment. The writing is absolutely exquisite. This book blew me away. I highly recommend it.
• 
  Alaíde Ventura

  Qué maldita maravilla. Una lección de qué sí hacer con el multiformato (materialmente, mixed media o como le digan), pero más: con las ideas que oscilan alrededor del nodo que es el yo, un yo nunca (¡pero nunca de los nuncas!) desvinculado, siempre un yo frente a otras, junto a otras, antes, después, a, ante bajo cabe con.
  
  Also, no hay que perderse las notas al pie, son otro diminuto libro igual de deslumbrante.
• 
  Paris (parisperusing)

  "You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o'clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: 1-800-SUICIDE. You dial the number. Do you feel like killing yourself? the man on the other end of the receiver asks. You tell him, I feel like I am already dead. When he makes no response you add, I am in death's position. He finally says, Don't believe what you are thinking and feeling. Then he asks, Where do you live? Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rings. … If he is forced to restrain you, he will have to report that he is forced to restrain you. It is this simple: Resistance will only make matters more difficult. … His tone suggests that you should try to understand the difficulty in which he finds himself. … You climb into the ambulance unassisted."
  
  Every time I read something of Claudia Rankine, it is like peeking through a portal into the past and the future at once, a harbinger of the many errors of the past and how we are still suffering those consequences today. Her seminal play, The White Card, was a refreshing exegesis on white consciousness, and the latitude of that shrewdness is fully realized in Don't Let Me Be Lonely. For people of color, Rankine explicates how our ambivalence toward health care, humankind, grief, and suicide clash tragically and timelessly with social, systemic and political forces. Reading this book now, 16 years after its publication, makes painfully clear how unprepared we still are for the wars ahead.
  
  To slip into the sea of Rankine's stream of consciousness is to risk being anchored by the heft of knowing the end of humanity feels closer than we know, but to be buoyed by our last shard of hope is the gamble that makes a life worth living.
• 
  Marc

  I had the same reaction to this book as I had to
  Citizen: An American Lyric: From page 1, I did not want to put it down. I actually made myself space it out and not just drop everything and everyone to finish it in a single sitting.
  
  This is a hybrid kind of prosetry lightly sprinkled with imagery. It's almost like small anecdotes and essays combined into a sort of lamenting lyric giving voice to isolation. The personal connects to the cultural connects to national/international events/figures/facts. Even the notes are rather striking and provide deepening context.
  
  Rankine gives form to our collective, exhausted sigh... She knew why it was so hard to breathe before we even knew just how hard it was/is.
• 
  Jim Elkins

  An Author Who Isn't Thinking About Images
  
  Note: this isn't a review, but a note on the author's use of images, for my project on the theory and history of books written with images, writingwithimages.com. Rankine's "Citizen" raises different issues, and that note is also on this site.
  
  In "Don't Let Me Be Lonely" the use of images seems mnemonic, evidentiary, decorative, offhanded, generic, unformatted, and therefore almost always uninteresting. In order:
  
  1. Mnemonic: the many images of people Rankine describes, such as Abner Louima, Johnny Cochrane, Amadou Diallo (pp. 56-57), are given as reminders of what those people look like, to bring them briefly into the reader's imagination. There's nothing objectionable about this practice, but it isn't an interesting or necessary use of images.
  
  2. Evidentiary: those images are also evidentiary, in that they point toward the fact that Rankine's entire narrative is about real politics, real history, and by implication her real reactions. But "evidentiary" might be better applied to photographs that indicate the narrative is telling a true story, for example the mammogram with the lump on p. 8.
  
  (The mismatch between the ferocity of the text and what I think of as the marginalized use of images is echoed in the mismatch between the book's very extensive "Notes" section, which describes most of the book's references at length, and the very short "Images" section, which is less than a full page. The cases of Louima, Diallo, and others are documented in "Notes," but often the "Images" file just says things like "(c) John Lucas," as if there is nothing more to be asked or known about the photographs.)
  
  3. Decorative: some illustrations, such as the still of "The Wild Bunch" on p. 25, don't illustrate the points made in the text, and appear to be optional ornaments.
  
  4. Offhanded: for example the drawings of lips speaking on p. 40, which looks tossed-off, as if Rankine had decided she wanted an image, but not what she wanted out of the image.
  
  5. Generic: for example the Google search bar on p. 72: it accompanies a specific idea of what might be searched, so it's too generic to be pertinent. It's not clear why a reader might want to be reminded of the general idea of a Google search.
  
  6. Unformatted: most of the images in this book seem carelessly placed on the page. Why does the text wrap around the image on p. 82, but not on p. 83? Why are the images narrower than the margins in most cases, but not in all? Why not decide those issues, especially if they might be distracting?
  
  This list could be longer. But these points are all symptoms: Rankine cares a great deal about her subject matter, but for her, in this book, images are ornaments, additions, extras, and bits of evidence. They are rarely objects of thought in their own right. The narrative seldom needs them; it's as if the narrative hardly knows what might be done with them. They never guide the story or argument. They are almost, but not quite, outside the text's imagination.
  
  (There are a few interesting uses of images in the book. I especially appreciate the repetition of the chalkboard marked "THIS IS THE MOST MISERABLE IN MY LIFE," which is shown four times on pp. 17-18, accompanying a narrative about a disastrous change in the person who wrote it.)
• 
  MJ Nicholls

  Perhaps a little dated, but if a poet can’t wax about the world now, or then, or now as it was then, what world are we living in? We’re not living in the world now, thassfursure, we’re living in the world then. When topical poems were out. (When this then is, I am uncertain. But let it be said poems about eating cheese in 1907 are hardly taught on campuses—or is it campi?) Anywho. This brisk series of prose-poems or prose lyrics ruminates coolly on contemporary America: scraping away at the darker layers of our lives, tipping often into polemic. (I think it’s campuses. But I like campi. Why can’t our plurals be more Latinate nowadays? What’s with these purple-headed octopi ruling the language? Or is it octopuses? They ought to be ashamed. I liked this book).
• 
  Ceren

  Omarm dit boek. Hou het bij je. Heel dicht bij je.
• 
  unnarrator

  Ah, you win, Claudia, for what's basically eighteen blogposts bound up as a book. You might have even gotten 5 stars out of me if it weren't for your ending, which didn't wrap back around to the personal in any way I found satisfying, but was probably meant to be some big-hearted opening out into the political, and I'm at fault as a reader for not respecting that, but it felt tacked on. Like, you just exited throwing a few quotations over your shoulder. Don't get me wrong I'm all FOR Fanny Howe and Celan, but letting them end your book seemed lame to me, and as if you were afraid for some reason of returning to the earlier nervy material.
  
  But I forgive you, because of passages like these:
  
  This week the indie channel is playing and replaying spaghetti westerns. Always someone gets shot or pierced through the heart with an arrow, and just before he dies he says, I am not going to make it. Where? Not going to make it where? On some level, maybe, the phrase simply means not going to make it into the next day, hour, minute, or perhaps the next second. Occasionally, you can imagine, it means he is not going to make it to Carson City or Texas or somewhere else out west or to Mexico if he is on the run. On another level always implicit is the sense that it means he is not going to make it to his own death. Perhaps in the back of all our minds is the life expectancy for our generation. Perhaps this expectation lingers there alongside the hours of sleep one should get or the number of times one is meant to chew food—eight hours, twenty chews, and seventy-six years. We are all heading there and not to have that birthday is not to have made it.
  
  ***
  
  Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.
• 
  charlie shaw

  "You'd let me be lonely? / I thought I was dead"
  "I want to see the lady who deals in death"
  "in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don't know because you don't care"
  "I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel"
  "Too scarred by hope to hope, to experienced to experience, too close to dead is what i think"
  "Peckinpah gives the final shoot-out in which they all die a kind of orgasmic rush that releases all of us from the cinematic or, more accurately, the American fantasy that we will survive no matter what"
  "Was Princess Diana ever really alive? I mean, alive to anyone outside of her friends and family-truly?"
  "She remembers the pain and want sit to have been worthwhile"
  "it was okay to cramp, to clog, to fold over at the gut, to have to put hand to flesh, to have to hold the pain, and then to translate it here"
  "Why are we here if not for each other?"
  "Then I think, maybe, that 'what women hasn't been raped' could be another way of saying 'this is the most miserable in my life'"
  "Stacked up along the highway are the wooden stretchers that were never needed"
  "The minute you stop fearing death you are no longer controlled by governments and councils. In a sense you are no longer accountable to life"
  "Why with such a nice smile are you trying to weep?"
  "Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex"
  "I used to think of myself as a fearless person"
  "it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to dark. It meant me. I felt sad"
  "what is there to say since rhetorically it's not about our oil under their sand but about freeing Iraqis from Iraqis and Osama is Saddam and Samman is 'that man who tried to kill my father' and the weapons of mass destruction are, well, invisible and Afghanistan is Iraq and Iraq is Syria and we see ourselves only through our own eyes and the British, but not the French, and Germany won't and Turkey won't join us but the coalition is inside Baghdad where the future is the threat the Americans feel they can escape though there is no escaping the Americans because war, this war, is about peace"
  "I am here / And I am still lonely"
  "Would a spider hole be considered a homeopathic cure for feeling like a corpse?"
• 
  Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm)

  “In a taxi speeding uptown on the West Side Highway, I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson until it finally occurs to me that feelings fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience. Though the experience is social, thoughts carry it into a singular space and it is this that causes the feelings of loneliness; or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness.”

  
  
  
  Claudia Rankine is a writer who has always interested me. Her mixed media approach to writing, joining fragmented prose and poetry with images in the form of photographs and graphics is extremely intriguing. Apart from playing with the form and structure, Rankine also jumps genres resulting in a hybrid work that's more than just a cursory curiosity. I was quite glad to finally get to her this year.
  
  She has a way of blurring the lines between autobiography, autofiction, & fiction that is instantly engaging. It is memoir as prose poetry refracted through an artistic lens that brings new ways of seeing to the surface. Don't Let Me Be Lonely can be easily referred to as a state of the nation book, an examination of America leading up to 9/11 as well as its aftermath, a dismantling of the dream, unity through fear.
  
  Paul Celan features repeatedly, & Rankine dips into popular culture and philosophy to spin a reflective exploration of the contemporary. Levinas to Hegel, Stein to Coetzee, Westerns to ads, news headlines to personal upsets, it all gets woven into narrative expanding in many directions. At its heart, she looks at the very human need for company & the debilitating vicissitudes of loneliness on mind and soul. It's also a book about death, the continuous shadow it casts over our lives, and the intersections of mental health, suicide, and pharmaceutical drugs.
• 
  Michael

  As with many others, I first encountered Rankine’s work through Citizen, which inspired me to read her other collections. I was pleased to find that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely anticipates many of the stylistic features that I found so compelling in Citizen, be it the collection’s fragmented structure, its evocative juxtaposition of text and image, or its refusal to answer the many questions that it raises.
• 
  Ellie

  I will write a longer review when I have some time but this book is, as is every other book I've read by Rankine, seriously compelling. The language is exquisite and the examination of life in America (in 2003) powerful. I can't wait to read this book again, along with every other book Rankine has written.
• 
  jo

  i wish this book had never ended.
• 
  Mind the Book

  I samband med Booker Prize-nomineringen ombads Sara Stridsberg ge några läsrekommendationer (i tidskriften Modern Psykologi, möjligen?) och det här var en av författarna som nämndes, ny för mig. Många beröringspunkter mellan dessa två samhällskommenterande författare med drömlik, bildrik, fragmentarisk och samtidigt isande skarp prosa.
  
  Under samma period lyssnade jag på podcasten '10 things that scare me' och den har också många gemensamma drag med Rankine, märkligt nog. Korta episoder, som dröjer sig kvar - och av stort sociologiskt intresse.
  
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/10-...
• 
  Christine

  Yes, everything about this is true too.
• 
  Megan O'Hara

  Anguish :)
• 
  Laura

  This book functions so beautifully as a whole, a genre of its own.
  
  
  
  . . . Perhaps we
  are not responsible for the lives of our parents--not in
  our pores or our very breath. We can expect. We can re-
  solve. We can come to terms with. Afterwards we wear
  their clothing, sit in their chairs, and remember them.
  Profoundly remember them. But we are not responsible. (63)
  
  
  Cancer slowly settled into her body and lived off it until
  it, her body, became useless to itself. A hell of a way
  to lose weight, she says when I step into her bedroom
  and take the look that becomes the unforgettable im-
  print. We watch a lot of television the four days I sit at
  her bedside. We talk. She grows tired. She is sad. She
  grows tired. She becomes angry. She grows tired. She
  is accepting. She grows tired. She grows tired. (9)
  
  You think the A stands for location, but it stands for function. (100)
  (Concentration camp number beginning with the letter A for arbeiter, the German word for worker, not Auschwitz.)
  
  "She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug." (5)
  
  Mr Tools, for a while the only person in the world
  walking around with an artificial heart, said the weird-
  est thing was being without a heartbeat. He was a pri-
  vate and perhaps lonely singularity. No one else could
  say, I know how you feel. The only living being without
  a heartbeat, he had a whirr instead. It was not the same
  whirr of a siren, but rather the fast repetitive whirr of
  a machine whose insistent motion might eventually
  seem like a silence. (71)
  
  
  It occurs to me that forty could be half my life or
  it could be all my life. On the television I am told I don't
  want to look like I am forty. Forty means I might have
  seen something hard, something unpleasant, or some-
  thing dead. I might have seen it and lived beyond it
  in time. Or I might have squinted my eyes too many
  times in order to see it. I might have turned my face
  to the sun in order to look away. I might have actually
  been alive. With injections of Botox, short for botulism
  toxin, it seems I can see or be seen without being seen;
  I can age without aging. I have the option of worry-
  ing without looking like I worry. Each day of this life I
  could bite or shake doubt as if to injure or kill without
  looking as if anything mattered to me. I could paralyze
  facial muscles that cause wrinkles. All those worry and
  frown lines would disappear. I could purchase paraly-
  sis. I could choose that. Eventually the paralysis would
  sink in, become a deepening personality that need not,
  like Enron's "distorting factors," distort my appear-
  ance. I could be all that seems, or rather I could be all
  that I am--fictional. Ultimately I could face reality un-
  disturbed by my own mortality. (104)
  
  
  Then my father dies and I cannot attend the funeral. It
  is not possible. I telephone my mother. We speak daily.
  I recommend cremation. I defend my recommenda-
  tion. I send flowers. What I want to send is a replace-
  ment mourner. I seems odd that I can neither rent nor
  buy this; no grieving service is available. . . (122)
  
• 
  Rebecca

  !!!!!!!!!!!! 10/5 stars
• 
  Cally Mac

  Always down for a ~150 page meditation on death. Much like Citizen but obviously of its time in that it talks more about television, the Iraq War, 9/11 etc.
• 
  syed

  i definitely will need to re-read this since a lot of the references went over my head, thankfully the notes section was very useful.
  essays on mental health, loneliness, racism, drugs, american foreign policy and advertising were my highlights.
  pop culture essays were very interesting but i relied heavily on the notes to know wtf was going on
  nice read
• 
  Shannon

  This was for class but wow it was really good. A beautiful collection of streams of consciousness in a post 9/11 America. I can’t wait to discuss this in class and see how much went over my head and understand the work more
• 
  Rachel

  Really great construction and writing. It is also a great page-turner and the perfect balm for unquestioned joy. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy it and appreciate it, merely that reading it should probably be done with some sound self-judgement.
  
  Rankine explores the commonplace attributes that form constellations within and around American lives. Expounded are broad themes of death and loneliness and specificity within depression, medication, television, race, and relationships. Though there is no central plot-line, an uncertain "I" is used (uncertain because the narrator may occasionally change), though the overall speaker is a black American woman. Perhaps Rankine herself. No linear construction seems to be followed, so narration often shifts back and forth between first and third, singular and plural.
  
  Though the individual pages often focus on a specific event or interaction, the notes blow it all up. I think the notes are just as important as the rest of the text, and to skip the notes would be to skip half the dialogue. The notes make reference to most pages. Composed of statistics, historical information, and alluded texts, they seem sometimes relevant and sometimes trivial. These give insight to the piece itself from a more outside, national perspective. One person has liver disease, but here are the national statistics on liver disease, here are the medications that may cause liver damage. (The recurring "America and liver" image by John Lucas on page 54 is suddenly even bigger than America stuffed in our stomachs.)
  
  The piece leaves me with a sense of depersonalized despair. But deeply personal depersonalized despair. A similar dissonance between body and bodies and bodies and bodies. A great lonely person in a sea of lonely people. A hopeless hope.
  
  "This conflation of the solidarity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive." (page 130)
• 
  Katie

  this felt like a book that needs to be simultaneously read and experienced. its a meditation and a reflection and it almost feels like i read it too fast, didnt give myself enough time to take it in. i dont want to forget anything about this book. i dont want to call it haunting but it sticks with you in a certain ethereal way. all i can think about is what it means to be alive. theres no universal answer to what it means to be alive, and this book offers a perspective that needs to be heard and felt.
• 
  Bryant

  I'd be happy reading a new prose poem by Claudia Rankine basically every day from here to forever.