Citizen: An American Lyric
A hybrid text of poetry, prose poem, and visual art documenting the experience of anti-Black racism in contemporary America, from microaggressions in casual conversation to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner to Serena Williams's treatment by tennis officials. Won every major American poetry prize available to it. The most politically urgent American poetry collection of the 21st century, and formally one of the most inventive.
The harshest reader complaint calls the prose-poem sections self-indulgent and diary-like, “terribly self-indulgent, formless adolescent gloop,” with whole passages leaving one reviewer unable to tell what incident was even being described, asking flatly, “what are you talking about?” Putting everyday slights in the same book, at the same register, as police killings strikes some readers as flattening the moral weight of the latter. Part VI, built from collaborative video scripts, gets called the weakest section repeatedly, readers saying it feels bolted on rather than integrated and recommending it be read last. A critic hedges too, calling the book “frequently powerful, occasionally opaque.” Readers expecting lineated, traditional verse are thrown by the prose-essay format and don't experience it as poetry at all, regardless of the awards it collected.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
