Claudia Rankine is one of the most powerful contemporary voices in modern poetry, known for blending personal experience with social and political realities. Her poems often explore themes like race, identity, belonging, and the subtle forms of discrimination that shape everyday life.
Her groundbreaking book Citizen: An American Lyric redefined what poetry can be by mixing prose, images, and cultural commentary. In this work, she highlights microaggressions and the emotional weight of being Black in America, making readers reflect deeply on society.
Rankine’s style is unique—quiet yet intense, simple yet deeply thought-provoking. Instead of traditional rhyme and structure, she uses a conversational tone that feels personal and immediate.
Overall, Claudia Rankine’s poetry is not just about beauty in language—it’s about truth, awareness, and challenging the reader to see the world more clearly.
Sound and fury
Claudia Rankine
The gloom is
the off-white of white. Because white can’t know
what white knows. Where’s the life in that?
Where’s the right in that? Where’s the white in that?
At the bone of bone white breathes the fear of being,
the frustration of seeming unequal to white.
White portraits on white walls signal ownership of all,
even as white walls white in.
And this is understandable, yes,
understandable because the culture claims white
is owed everything—a wealth of inheritance
a system insures. In each generation
the equation holds—and better than
before and indifferent to now and enough
and always and inevitably white.
This is what it means to wear a color and believe
its touch an embrace. Even without luck
or chance of birth the scaffolding has rungs
and legacy and the myth of meritocracy fixed in white.
That’s how white holds itself together
as the days hold so many white would not—
White is living within brick-and-mortar, walling off
all others’ loss, exhaustion, aggrieved
exposure, dispossessed despair—
in daylight white hardens its features.
Eyes, which hold all light, harden.
Jaws, closing down on justice,
harden into a fury that will not call
white to account even as for some
its pledge is cut out from under.
If people could just come clean about their lives,
even as poverty exists inside white walls,
and just being white is what’s working.
Who implies white could disown its own
even as white won’t strike its own structure.
Even as white won’t oust its own system.
All redress fuels nothing the second another
can be thrown out.
In daylight white’s right to righteous rage
doubles down on the supremacy
of white in our way.
From “Citizen,” V [Sometimes “I” is supposed to hold what is not there]
Claudia Rankine
Sometimes “I” is supposed to hold what is not there until it is.
Then what comes apart the closer you are to it.
This makes the first person a symbol for something.
The pronoun barely holding the person together.
Someone claimed we should use our skin as wallpaper knowing we couldn’t win.
You said “I” has so much power; it’s insane.
And you would look past me, all gloved up, in a big coat, with fancy fur around the collar, and record a self saying, you should be scared, the first person can’t pull you together.
Shit, you are reading minds, but did you try?
Tried rhyme, tried truth, tried epistolary untruth, tried and tried.
You really did. Everyone understood you to be suffering and still everyone thought you thought you were the sun—never mind our unlikeness, you too have heard the noise in your voice.
Anyway, sit down. Sit here alongside.
Exactly why we survive and can look back with furrowed brow is beyond me.
It is not something to know.
Your ill-spirited, cooked, hell on Main Street, nobody’s here, broken-down, first person could be one of many definitions of being to pass on.
The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.
Drag that first person out of the social death of history, then we’re kin.
Kin calling out the past like a foreigner with a newly minted “fuck you.”
Maybe you don’t agree.
Maybe you don’t think so.
Maybe you are right, you don’t really have anything to confess.
Why are you standing?
Listen, you, I was creating a life study out of a monumental first person, a Brahmin first person.
If you need to feel that way—still you are in here and here is nowhere.
Join me down here in nowhere.
Don’t lean against the wallpaper; sit down and pull together.
Yours is a strange dream, a strange reverie.
No, it’s a strange beach; each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads.
what if
By Claudia Rankine
i
What does it mean to want an age-old call
for change
not to change
and yet, also,
to feel bullied
by the call to change?
How is a call to change named shame,
named penance, named chastisement?
How does one say
what if
without reproach? The root
of chastise is to make pure.
The impossibility of that—is that
what repels and not
the call for change?
ii
There is resignation in my voice when I say I feel
myself slowing down, gauging like a machine
the levels of my response. I remain within
so sore I think there is no other way than release—
so I ask questions like I know how
in the loneliness of my questioning.
What’s still is true; there isn’t even a tremor
when one is this historied out.
I could build a container to carry this being,
a container to hold all, though we were never
about completeness; we were never to be whole.
I stand in your considered thoughts also broken,
also unknown, extending
one sentence—here, I am here.
As I’ve known you, as I’ll never know you,
I am here. Whatever is
being expressed, what if,
I am here awaiting, waiting for you
in the what if, in the questions,
in the conditionals,
in the imperatives—what if.
iii
What if over tea, what if on our walks, what if
in the long yawn of the fog, what if in the long middle
of the wait, what if in the passage, in the what if
that carries us each day into seasons, what if
in the renewed resilience, what if in the endlessness,
what if in a lifetime of conversations, what if
in the clarity of consciousness, what if nothing changes?
iv
What if you are responsible to saving more than to changing?
What if you’re the destruction coursing beneath
your language of savior? Is that, too, not fucked up?
You say, if other white people had not . . . or if it seemed like
not enough . . . I would have . . .
What if—the repetitive call of what if—is only considered repetitive
when what if leaves my lips, when what if is uttered
by the unheard, and what if
what if is the cement of insistence
when you insist what if
this is.
v
What is it we want to keep conscious, to stay known, even as we
say, each in our own way, I so love I know I shrink I’m asked
I’m also I react I smell I feel I think I’ve been told I remember I
see I didn’t I thought I felt I failed I suspect I was doing I’m sure
I read I needed I wouldn’t I was I should’ve I felt I could’ve I
never I’m sure I ask . . .
You say and I say but what
is it we are telling, what is it
we are wanting to know about here?
vi
What if what I want from you is new, newly made
a new sentence in response to all my questions,
a swerve in our relation and the words that carry us,
the care that carries. I am here, without the shrug,
attempting to understand how what I want
and what I want from you run parallel—
justice and the openings for just us.
