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 academi...

“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 int...

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...

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.

"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 yo...

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.

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.

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 dark...

"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 accurat...

i wish this book had never ended.

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

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

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/fac...

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.

!!!!!!!!!!!! 10/5 stars

Anguish :)

Yes, everything about this is true too.

This book functions so beautifully as a whole, a genre of its own. . . . Perhaps weare not responsible for the lives of our parents--not inour pores or our very breath. We can expect. We can re-solve. We can come to terms with. Afterwards we weartheir 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 untilit, her body, became useless to itself. A hell of a wayto lose weight, she says whe...

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.

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.