Why read Don't Let Me Be Lonely?

Book cover of Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Book description

A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the visual, Rankine…

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African American authors

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Why read it?

1 author picked Don't Let Me Be Lonely as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Joseph Fasano

Author

Ultimately, this is a work about trauma, both personal and cultural; it is a deeply human testimony to trauma’s power to erase, shape, and reshape the narratives of our lives.

The self, this book implies, is one such narrative, and the forces of contemporary society act in powerful and often surreptitious ways to shape that story.

Rankine is a complete original in her methods of tackling these mysteries, and a reader leaves this book with a sense of having woken, if only a bit more, to the forces that are living our lives for us.

From Joseph's list on greatest book-length poems of the past 50 years.