The End of the Alphabet: Poems by Claudia Rankine

The End of the Alphabet: Poems Reviews

• 
  Ellie

  
  Claudia Rankine is one of the brilliant poets/essayists of our time. Her poetry can be a mix of prose poems and more classical forms and can examine race issues with a painful clarity or delve into the area of emotional life. She is the author of one of my favorite books this year,
  Citizen: An American Lyric, a mix of forms exploring race relations in America.
  
  
  The End of the Alphabet: Poems is Rankine's second book of poetry. It is dense and painful. Having finished the book once through, I felt compelled to go back and then weave through the poems. I then read several essays/reviews about the book. The more I learned, the richer the poems (already powerful on the first two reads) became.
  
  The language is sometimes incandescent, sometimes direct. The poems are a painful exploration of what appears to be a possibly abusive relationship as well as a miscarriage or abortion. Rankine doesn't flinch in her writing at the messy, painful parts of life. There is no easy closure or lesson to be learned. Like life itself, there are moments of beauty amidst very painful experiences.
  
  My review doesn't do justice to the poems, it is simply a gesture towards their beauty. Even without full understanding I was enraptured by the volume.
  
  Strongly recommended to anyone who loves language and/or is interested in lived experience.
• 
  Lauren

  Challenging poems and largely left me confused. I prefer Rankine's later work.
• 
  Anita

  Idk I can't really understand poetry all the time so I won't rate this book but ogle this phrase: "the thickened bones of the street"
  Or this one: "the tongue is a muscle just strolling along."
  
  Me: nice
• 
  Jamie

  The day I am at peace I will have achieved
  a kind of peace even I know suggests I am crazy.
  But, as it will be how I survive, I will not feel so.

  More poems that beg to be read aloud.
• 
  Grace Greggory Hughes

  A chaos of typeset letters are on the ground; the poetry begins with the cover art.
  
  The End of the Alphabet: Poems by Claudia Rankine is an extraordinary work that you will want to read through at least twice. Rankine uses techniques of excellent narrative fiction to deliver an intense portrait of the slow devolution of a relationship that needed to end, but it’s all poetry.
  
  

  Remember a future
  from another dream
  and hold on.
  
  ‘Overview is a place’
  Claudia Rankine / The End of the Alphabet

  
  
  Each poem leads onto the next, and together, they are a narrative whole. The poetry is dense and ominous, its story spilling into horror and the grotesque before releasing us from its grip at the end where closure is not simple, but it is truthful and ongoing.
  
  

  Assurance collapses naturally
  as if each word were a dozen rare birds
  flown away. And gone
  
  elsewhere is their guaranteed landing.
  
  ‘Overview is a place’
  Claudia Rankine / The End of the Alphabet

  
  
  She is deft at obscuring her meaning, outright signaling that she’s doing that without giving her plot away until the moment she intends, a slow dawning understanding that deepens all that went before, a page or two, a poem or two, later.
  
  

  Unhyphen the self from the part that cannot leave the cruelty of this. For it is
  better to curse, Shut up, Shut up, before understanding sets in.
  
  ‘Toward biography’
  Claudia Rankine / The End of the Alphabet

  
  
  She drops the word fossil into a line early on in the poems. By the end of the book, the metaphor of it is still unwinding, the whole volume, a spiral of time and event, like an ammonite relic, something long gone and solidly present.
  
  Claudia Rankine was born in Jamaica in 1963. She is a celebrated multi-award winning American poet, essayist, and playwright. The End of the Alphabet was her 2nd published collection of poems.
• 
  Lurk42

  I'm not brilliant at reviewing poetry. I can only tell you how it makes me feel. This book is like walking over beautiful glittering glass. So jagged and painful and enticing. Rankine pulled me onto the floor to roll around in the squalor that is despair--the ugliness, the neverendingness, the "too much" of despair.
  
  I never figured out a significant incident that triggered the grief, and I was never sure what was trigger and what was result. The effect was the same--as it is with the dark dirty hole of emptiness.
  
  These/this poem grabs the reader by the throat and drags them along for the topsy turvy ride and never lets up. Yet somehow at the end of the 100 pages, I gasped for breath and felt a little lighter.
• 
  Marc

  I would have abandoned this at the halfway point were it not so slim and quick a read. I just never connected with any of it in any way. For me, somehow the formalism and innovation rendered the emotional almost null and the language entered my eyes as lines and words only to fall out my ears as mere letters.
  
  I was blown away by both
  Citizen: An American Lyric and
  Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. If you’re new to Rankine, I would highly recommend these.
• 
  Blue Burke

  Rankine never ceases to impress me. THE END OF THE ALPHABET is a complex, difficult read that requires more than one pass. The poetry is haunting, sensual, tragic and beautiful in its description of alienation and what it means to be alive--or rather dead while alive. I will continue to reread these poems in hopes of better understanding her words. Rankine belongs in the ranks of poets such as Lowell and Plath. The title perfectly represents the decay of body, life, and words that is present in the book. A masterpiece!
• 
  Elianne Elderen

  “how far we can enter into hell and still sit down for Sunday dinner.”
  
  De urgentie druipt van elk woord in deze bundel. Complexiteit trouwens ook, maar dat kenmerkt volgens mij ook haar poging om gevoel in taal om te zetten. In tegenstelling tot de meeste dichters, die volgens mij toch vooral mooie zinnen proberen te vormen die zo dicht mogelijk in de buurt komen van iets dat net raakt aan hun gevoel, weigert Rankine ‘formeel’ of ‘kloppend’ taalgebruik wanneer dat betekent dat ze daar niet haar exacte en volledige emotie in kan uiten. Rankine lijkt geen genoegen te willen nemen met ‘gangbaar’ taalgebruik waarmee je gevoel vaak slechts lijkt te kunnen benaderen maar nooit echt te raken. Juist door precies te zeggen wat ze wil, en de complexiteit en het gebrek door te voeren in haar taalgebruik, werkt het.
  
  (She would not see it if she had been disgraced she would not
  see she would not put it in front she
  would not have it put in front she said do not bring it to me
  if she has been disgraced
  she said remind me of something else
  an actress or a place something
  juice in the islands of Langerhans the four-legged beast
  nosing a crotch she said remind me of anything
  she would not see if she had been disgraced
  she said never get into the skin of someone you won’t know
  she said homiletic over the osso buco she said
  listen to me disgraced do not put it do not bring it to me.
  *
• 
  Tzipora

  3.5 Stars
  
  

  “At first, embarrassed, lumbering beneath the formal poses, the well-cuffed, the combed hairs, the could-not-be-faulted statement of ease, though utterly and depleted, closing the door behind, for in this, the distance—wanting and the body losing, all the time losing, beforehand, inside.”

  
  
  These poems are gorgeously and vividly written with a rhythm that I find especially appealing and interesting. But I also find them to be very dense. Rankin’s poems are the kind you have to sit with and sometimes reread stanzas and portions several times to even begin to penetrate through to the meaning. You have to do some work for these but it’s worth it. I am never sure if poems should be like song lyrics- able to mean many things, maybe something different to each reader. Or whether I need to shove my own connections aside and dig and try to understand what the author intended. I suppose that’s up to every reader and also that you can have both. But I say this because I am not so sure I always understood exactly what was being communicated in every line. I used to find poetry like this very intimidating and while I’ve always loved to read and write poetry, that intimidation put me off for awhile. So this is not a collection I would recommend to someone new to reading poetry or if you know already that dense, more opaque work isn’t your thing. I think any reader could find beauty, skill, talent in these though. Rankin is stunningly descriptive and astmospheric. Even if you are unsure of the broader meaning to the poem there’s so many incredible word pictures painted with each line, sometimes in only the rhythm of a few words at a time.
  
  I’m by no means a poetry expert or anywhere near as widely read as I’d like to be but I found her work incomparable. Her style is one all her own. And I will add that while I read this one digitally (available on Hoopla, a format where it your library offers the service, everyone has access to the same collection so it doesn’t, as far as I’m aware, vary from one library to the next.) her style is one that really needs to be read as printed. She uses and experiments a lot with the physical structure on the page. Nothing too extreme. But I always feel poets who do a lot of that need to be read as intended and this is the extreme flaw of ebooks. I normally prefer ebooks and find them easier to read for my specific needs and brain but not here. If you can access a physical copy, do.
  
  So why not four or even five stars? There’s a lot of different aspects of her style I like but there’s something about the way those aspects- and one I really don’t like- come together that leaves me meh. I often loved parts of poems and found myself asking what the point was or downright bored at other parts and think many of these would be so much better, tighter, and less opaque if they were shorter. I guess also as much as I’m a fan- write this way myself- of the use of sentence fragments or several powerful words alone to evoke a feeling, there’s something about how Rankine does this almost exclusively yet ventures from the descriptive and emotional to everyday details like going to a restaurant and what they ordered or a conversation at a bar, (so from the vague to the specific), with a style that just doesn’t lend well to it. I’m not particularly a fan of people who write those kinds of details into poems most of the time (unless you really surprise me with it. It’s got to mean something.) I never quite felt these meant anything to anyone but were more written in for a specific person to recognize and see, not for broader consumption. And that also seemed to be an issue with some of the poems in general, maybe overly specific in parts to make them unrelatable, yet at other times she was so vague and dense and difficult that I found it hard to relate.
  
  And as much as I can appreciate having to work to “get” a poem I feel as if the pay off wasn’t there much of the time to make it worth it for me. There’s lots of beauty and talent here, some incredible, evocative lines, and stanzas I did see, feel, and connect to on a personal level and maybe poetry is all a matter of taste. For me, I’ve read many far better collections, that clicked with me and my tastes more. This is also an earlier work by Ms. Rankine, written 16 years before her critically acclaimed
  Citizen: An American Lyric (something I confess I’ve not yet read). I cannot see this collection appealing in such a broad way and assume- and would even expect from the clearly very evident talent- that she’s only gotten much better with time and experience. I would absolutely read her work again and plan to. I would probably only recommend this one to true poetry lovers and would definitely not hand it to someone who is just starting to get into poetry or wants to explore it after being convinced it wasn’t for them.
  
  Personally, I especially liked the poems “Hunger to the table”, “In this sense, beyond” and loved “Residual in the hour”. And I would be remiss not to share a few of those gorgeous, favorite lines of mine. So here were a few that especially stood out to me-
  
  

  “Gnaw. Zigzag. The end of the alphabet buckling floors”
  
  “Lower the lids and the mind swims out into what is not madness, and still the body feels small
  
  against such flooding hurled through the dull and certain dawn.
  
  You, you are defeat composed.”
  
  “The tongue is a muscle
  simply strolling along.”
  
  “Sunday. Monday … Friday they rescued each other. The one or the other pried open the parentheses. Love, the direction”
  
  “The day I am at peace I will have achieved a kind of peace even I know suggests I am crazy.
  But, as it will be how I survive, I will not feel so.”
• 
  Isabel

  I had a lump in my throat the whole time. Expansive yet intimate. Body, miscarriage, possession. Rankine's poetry is, as ever, powerfully affecting.
  
  (Unsure if I noticed/was drawn to this especially because I'm also reading Barthes, but the proliferation of parentheses here, asides spilling into asides, was fascinating.)
• 
  Lisa

  Grueling. Usually I read a poetry collection twice. This time I can’t bring myself to.
• 
  Desirae

  I found these poems to be rather lifeless, honestly.
• 
  Cate Tedford

  I was introduced to Claudia Rankine with her text Citizens nearly three years ago in a poetry course taught by Dr. Stevie Edwards (thank you Dr. Edwards if you see this!!). This is the first I have picked up Rankine since then, but I am so glad I did.
  
  This work is the poetry of how to save your own life. It is the story that life both goes on and it does’t. It is Rankine’s brutal, embodied experience of beauty and survival. Her words take you by the hand and forcefully pull you along with her, to see the world as she sees it, in curiosity and clarity, for all its shit and pain, and for all the cracks in the sidewalk where the flowers grow.
  
  “Clearly, you know,
  so say, This earth untouched is ruptured enough to grieve.”
  
  “We live through, survive
  without regard for the self. Forgiving
  each day insisting it be forgiven, thinking
  our lives umbilical, tied up with living with how far
  we can enter into hell and still sit down for Sunday dinner.”
  
  “…to where okay
  masquerades as the first word
  because reason forced its pieces into a furious fit
  to cultivate dumbness…”
• 
  Juan

  This book was an eye-opener for me because of many reasons including what being alive is, and what it means to be alive. I really enjoyed reading this book because of the themes explored in this book. And it definitely left me thinking about those topics. Like I said before I really enjoyed reading this book. I would definitely recommend it to anyone, especially my friends. I think this book is a great experience to go through.
• 
  Sara (onourshelves)

  I am not going to rate this in stars because I did not understand it (I have vaccine brain fog/headaches so I will blame myself for that one). Overall, the only things I can really share is that these poems were long and dense, intellectually difficult, and did not really feel any emotions come out of the writing.
• 
  Jaime Robles

  A brilliant piece of writing in the school of difficult poetry. This is poetry about the dissolution of a love affair. Though it spans a range of emotions what is most startling and original about this writing is Rankine's language and use of metaphor.
• 
  Sarah

  I love these poems. This stays by my bed.
• 
  Cathy

  It's not easy reading but this woman packs a punch. Wow.
• 
  anna

  i feel exhausted from this. the good kind of course. worth a hundred more re reading just to bask in the intricate and complex, first rate poems.
• 
  Sophie Evans

  SO powerful. As someone who has come from another country, the feeling of isolation and alienation really hit me. What a brilliant poet.
  
  "In memory, remorse wraps the self" - this is perfect
• 
  Meghan

  I’d do anything to study w Claudia Rankine. ANYTHING!!! (Like, write a 2-pg personal statement and produce a halfway decent writing sample)
• 
  Melinda

  To me this started out as dark and moody but gradually lightened towards the end of the book. I don’t read much poetry but I did enjoy this and will read more of her work soon.
• 
  Kent

  I am interested in what is the most accurate way of revealing an emotionally charged subject. Here Rankine suffers through a relationship, a pregnancy, and a separation. I wonder what is the most honest way of telling a story. This narrative arc can only be gleaned through various hints brought into the poems, where they seem to indulge narrative for a moment, does this mean the poet is trying to conceal something from her reader? Or is she merely requiring her reader to think of emotional trauma differently. Other books create a similar dilemma, but I think the Rankine reveals itself as a significant lyric committed to making a reader understand, just differently understood.
• 
  Susan

  On Monday, I will be attending a talk given by this author and will seek her guidance on how to read her poems. Judging from GR reviews on this book, I am strangely clueless on how to read poems such as Claudia Rankine's lyrics. I have tried to read other works of hers and find myself just thrashing around in words, no window to look in or out of, no voice, just...
  
  Maybe I should re-read it.
• 
  Don Hackett

  This is a tentative rating until I go back and reread. The poems were difficult to follow, though evocative. As I read further into the book, they seemed to make more sense and I think I I was learning to read her.