Claudia Rankine's Citizen is a book that I can't help picking up. It's incredibly intriguing and emotion-provoking. I've never been a huge fan of poetry, but when I do read it, I like searching for striking lines. Citizen is full of lines that make you stop and think before continuing on. So far, there have been several times where I've had to reread a line 2 or 3 times because it was so intense and I wanted to understand it in its entirety.
One line that especially stands out to me is, "Yes, and you want it to stop, you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself" (17).
The last part of this line was what got to me. When I read it I feel so much anger towards the man who didn't help the boy up because he couldn't even recognize him as a person, I feel hopeless like I'm the boy who got knocked over and have long ago come to the realization that that is the way life is, and I feel helpless that there's nothing I can do to change how people, like the man in this line, act. The fact that a single sentence by Rankine has the ability to evoke all of these emotions shows how amazing her poetry is.
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