To be black, Citizen insists, is to be audibly, palpably, invisible, and the book is in large part a struggle to make that feeling tangible. As she notes, “a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.”

This passage (from one of the reviews we read) resonates with me. So does the the poetry of Citizen. This writing articulates for me (in a very personal way) some of my own experiences as an American citizen. Rankine makes keen observations about everyday experiences in the “black experience” (for lack of better description). She is laying out here the myriad ways that  African Americans experience “double consciousness” and “otherness.” And beyond that, I believe, this work articulates the deleterious effects of cumulative exposure to linguistic (and otherwise),  negative purveyors of marginalization, erasure and invisibility. Her poetry bespeaks the feeling of a low-grade PTSD,  tinnitus,  an irritating, gnat-like presence attendant in every social transaction of a “subordinate” subculture.

One reviewer states that  “Rankine’s lyric is meditative interiority plunged into ice-cold history.” I can  appreciate this observation as my experience is that her poetry is akin to the stream of consciousness literary technique. This “interiority,” as the reviewer characterizes it,  emphasizes the psychology of the experiences Rankine describes. It also helps the reader to understand the necessity of this kind of hyper processing (and the stress that it induces) in the navigation of an ordinary life.