Essays from the front lines of the classroom.
Helping you bring Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric to your students.

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“The window slides down into its door-sleeve”

BY LESLEY WHEELER

“Conversation about poetry often toggles between why and how—the matter and the means—but Rankine’s poetry is both uncommonly urgent and formally distinctive. The experiment of teaching her work involved constant course corrections, as I kept realizing I’d swerved too much into one lane or the other.”

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Notes on Failing

BY LISA OLSTEIN

“To read is not to silence. To engage a text—as makers of poems, as dedicated readers of poetry, as students whose current and maybe future work is to read and to write poetry—should be the opposite of silencing, should be our best ever-imperfect way of honoring: the poems, poetry, the poet, ourselves.”

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The Emptiness of Empathy: Towards a Pedagogy of Discomfort

BY TRACI BRIMHALL

“Perhaps this means there’s hope that we can age into a more radical empathy, by which I do not mean a greater forgiveness or a broader reach, but rather an empathy that feels uncomfortable and doesn’t try to fix that feeling. An empathy that doesn’t make us feel like a better person because our imagination could wedge itself into someone else’s shoes. An empathy without congratulation.”

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Citizen in Hong Kong

BY IRA SUKRUNGRUANG

“Students got angry. And students cried. And students became aware of themselves on a deeper level. What Rankine’s book opened up for them was the idea of global racism. Racism is an international problem, not an American one. And because the class was comprised of students of different ethnicities who shared different stories, who have experienced different forms of discrimination, we were able to go beyond blame and fault.”

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Giving Credit

BY JOLENE BRINK

“I credit Citizen for helping us recognize all the ways we aren’t immune from knowing or protesting the racial injustice occurring in our country. And in the end, I credit it for teaching me what I am still learning how to say and the myriad ways of knowing better.”

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The Pedagogy of Listening: Citizen as Required Reading, Rankine Required Reader

BY EMILIA PHILLIPS

“I also began to listen expectantly to Rankine with the hope that, in some way, she would speak directly to my student or at least seem to, in order to comfort him. I then realized just how much I was relying upon Rankine in terms of all of my students’ education, how much I wanted them to hear her voice and her words, and not my own.”

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Pure Conduit: The Superconductive Powers of Rankine’s “You”

BY SIOBHÁN SCARRY

“Because if Citizen teaches us anything, it is that what happens in this country between human beings is ours, a shared burden to bear and to lift. As Rankine writes in part VII, ‘What happens to you doesn’t belong to you, only half concerns you. It’s not yours. Not yours only.’”

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