Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist and playwright; her numerous works include the ground-breaking American Lyric trilogy, Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Citizen (2014) and Just Us (2020). A chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets, she is recipient of many honours including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Forward Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She is a professor of creative writing at New York University, and has previously taught at Pomona College and Yale University.
Exquisite . . . This collection is made from language to live on
and in. It's the sort of book you read with your body as much as
your mind. I'm quite sure readers will find themselves transformed
by it
*Claire Lynch*
It's both stunning and utterly logical that before embarking on the
landmark American Trilogy where she would tackle the largest themes
of public life with such personal detail and vehemence, Claudia
Rankine's writing was grounded in this dazzlingly laser-like and
movingly original meditation on not so much motherhood or
parenthood as pregnancy itself. Rankine slides from one form to
another, and animates everyday domestic life with a grand sense of
literary history and sensibility. It's as if this book is pregnant
with her entire poetic project
*Lara Feigel*
Plot is inexhaustibly complex, varied, and difficult-and as
fearlessly and even grimly inventive and searching as one can
conceive any book of poems as being. It instantly joins the few
contemporary works ... whose gravity is synonymous with the passion
and integrity of their intelligence
*Verse*
To read her work is to be drawn deep into a thought's unfolding,
into the eerie landscape of a dream; the dislocation one feels is
tempered by the assurance of the writing, the deftness of Rankine's
experiments with words and ideas
*Indiana Review*
I am awestruck. Quite simply, I have never read anything like Plot.
Its stupendous intelligence . . . marks it as a masterpiece
*Mary Gordon, author of PAYBACK*
Plot moves as in a picaresque novel, in which the body schemes and
frightens, accompanied by Claudia Rankine's instinct for poetic
surprise
*Barbara Guest, author of THE RED GAZE*
A fiercely gifted poet . . . She knows when to bless and to curse .
. . [and] makes you hopeful for American poetry
*Robert Hass, author of SUMMER SNOW*
A startling and eloquent exploration of states in, about, and
around maternity . . . This is an unsettling poetry of the body
wrestling itself in the making of thought
*Charles Bernstein*
Spiraling around the story of "Liv" and "Erland" and their future
child, "Ersatz," this book-length poem embeds its loose "plot" in
the sensations and anxieties of birth and child-rearing . . .
striking . . . This book seems consciously aimed at the nexus of
several different feminist avant-garde projects, from the nouveau
roman of Monique Wittig to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee
*Publishers Weekly*
[Claudia Rankine's] books trace their own sort of movement . . . In
Plot, the crisis sharpens, revolving around life and birth-the
narrative center is a woman reluctant to give birth to a child who
is already growing inside her . . . surprising
*Paris Review*
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