Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

A feeling I haven’t talked about while doing this project is the horrible realization that you stumble across at some point during a book that you have completely missed the boat. This doesn’t happen with every book you read, not every book ruptures your view of the world, but sometimes a book hits so hard you realize that your life has been less without it.

“Citizen” was published in 2014, was reviewed nearly everywhere, was a New York Times bestseller, and was a finalist for, or won, numerous prizes. I had not heard of it until my buddy Andy pointed it out at Porch Light Books in Edmonton and told me to buy it. There are some friends whose direction you heed without question.

If this book is new to you there are some things you should know going in. Yes, it is essentially a book-length poem which pushes the lyric form into all sorts of different places – all of them rooted so firmly in real events that you can remember, that you were there for, that you can’t escape. This is not a pleasant journey but it is a necessary one. The poem describes what it is like to be a black artist, to be a black academic, to be a black friend, to be a black athlete, to be black in public, to be alive while being black.

Not being black, I had understood that these things existed. Not being black I could not understand these things while existing. This is where poetry comes in. For those of us who aren’t black, this book gives you a peek under the hood, (the cover art is a piece by David Hammons called “In the Hood”) as it were. For those of us whose are not publicly categorized by our skin colour (though as many, many artists and academics continue to remind us, and though it still hasn’t entered mainstream consciousness, whiteness is a racial construct as much as anything. Being white is not the absence of being black, being white is actively something, many things) this book is a teaching.

This is your call to action this week: tead this book then read it again. Share it.

If you follow me over on BlueSky you already know that I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. For some of the days this week, I couldn’t reduce my experience to one or two short lines. Doing that felt like a violence, a minimization, done to the text or something trite and reductive. However, one of my active definitions of poetry is cramming as much meaning and impact into as few words as possible so…. here is quote from “Claudia Rankine” “Citizen” that is driving my creativity this week:

Then you are stretched out on the hood. Then cuffed. Get on the ground now.