More on Claudia Rankine's Double NBCC Nominations

Writers of the literary sort are flocking to expand on the news of Claudia Rankine being nominated for not one, but two National Book Critics Circle Awards--in poetry and criticism. As Flavorwire wrote on Tuesday:

For many, the nomination of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric in two categories — poetry and criticism — is welcome and just. Not only was the book snubbed at the National Book Awards, the ceremony itself was marred by a moment of casual racism of the exact kind anatomized by Citizen. Daniel Handler’s joke about watermelon at the expense of NBA winner Jacqueline Woodson could have easily been an episode in Rankine’s book, which is, among many other things, a compilation of such moments and a poetic investigation of the toll they take on black lives and black bodies.

The NBCC’s twin nominations of Citizen are a first: no book has ever been nominated in two categories. It is also, I think, the correct decision. Nevertheless, you can’t just nominate a book in two categories because you think it is superior or timely. The same could have been done for other finalists on that basis; for example, the winner of the John Leonard Award, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, is both strong and topical, but as good as it is, I don’t think it should have received nominations in other categories.

Nor should Citizen have been nominated in the criticism category strictly on the basis of its prose stanzas and essay sections, although they are a factor. Certainly the book’s elegant and purposeful construction brings a new dimension to American poetry, one that recalls the essayistic innovations in cinema made by Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker, whose words provide Citizen’s epigraph: “If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.”

And the Washington Post talked to Rankine's editor, Graywolf Executive Editor Jeffrey Shotts:, about the "runaway bestseller" (they have 40,000 copies of Citizen in circulation):

“‘Citizen’ is that very rare book that can focus with precision and honesty about race in a way we haven’t seen before,” Shotts says. “It compels both the wider reader and the critical reader. It is poetry, it is essay, it is autobiography, it is cultural criticism, it is illustrated text.”

Part of the difficulty of describing “Citizen” is that it’s not like anything most of us have read before. And yet thousands of people are responding to it.

Shotts says that the book’s innovative structure — which makes it so hard to categorize — isn’t just an act of artistic experimentation. “The complexity of Rankine’s subjects — racial micro aggressions, John Henryism (a PTSD suffered from the accumulation of daily racial tension), Serena Williams, Zidane, let alone the black and brown body as depicted in art and literature — needs a complex form,” he says.

Read it all at Flavorwire and the Washington Post.