or our American optimism the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. The sadness is not really about George W. Bush, unable to recall whether two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in Texas. The opposite, though, is the callousness of President G.W. “Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naive, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time,” she writes. The hybrid prose-lyric-poem form gives Rankine space to both describe and question her experience of news like Amadou Diallo’s senseless death in a hail of bullets. She juxtaposes the brutality of police sodomizing Abner Louima with a broken broomstick against the violence of a reporter asking him how it feels to be a rich man after he settles for $8.7 million. Her writing is particularly charged when exploring the visceral, personal experience of grief, disconnection and futility wrought by media depictions of racial violence. Or responsibility is not connected to sense-making, the courts have decided.” This is an unexpected brand of poetry. “To know and not to understand is perhaps one definition of being a child. “The boy was tried as an adult or he was tried as a dead child,” she writes. She pierces our illusions with tight analyses of the news of the day, such as a 13-year-old convicted of first degree murder for killing a 6-year-old while play wrestling. This is challenging terrain, but Rankine navigates it masterfully, evoking sadness, anger, and resignation without belaboring them. Her sister, a psychiatrist, unable to help herself after her husband and children are killed.

Another gazing listlessly at the TV while asking for “the woman who deals in death,” meaning the show Murder, She Wrote. A friend submitting to cancer, safekeeping her death with a do-not-resuscitate sign. The rest of the book ranges over the territory of loneliness–mourning, depression, oppression–with a poet’s flare for imagery and economy.

“He looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness,” she writes. He was grieving his own mother’s death, and Rankine climbed the stairs as far from him as she could, distancing herself from his unfamiliar expression. The book of poetry and prose vignettes opens with author Claudia Rankine as a child witnessing her father looking flooded, leaking, breaking, broken. “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is an evocative exploration of loss.

Don t let me be lonely book