Triage - by Claudia Rankine (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us

Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.

Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, "collapse" takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.

Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. "No matter our posture," Rankine writes, "we are all among the rubble." This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.

Review Quotes

"Claudia Rankine has a poetic voice like no other. Her lines, freighted with political urgency and psychic acuity, profoundly question the validity and viability of 'these truths, ' whether spoken in faith or twisted out of shape. Rankine's body poetic refuses the compromises and consolations of the body politic. If Citizen was Rankine's American lyric, Triage is her elegiac anti-memoir of 'these times.'"--Homi K. Bhabha

"Triage is a stunning book. In this blend of essay, memoir, fabulation, and criticism, the intimate encounters between the narrator and the theorist offer an extended meditation on the collective devastation of the present. The body bears the weight of this brutality and violence and collapses under the burden of all that we are forced to carry. To yield, to break down is a self-interruption and a letting go, a gesture of survival. The collapse is the embodiment of our shared desolation, an act of dwelling with the tombless and the unwept, a recognition of our destitution. The beauty of Rankine's dense, elliptical sentences guides us through this ruination."--Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

"Triage is transfixing. What Claudia Rankine achieves here seems almost impossible, utterly daring, and full of risk. This book is a masterwork, faultless and taut, that stitches together a fractured, aching world with precise and subtle language that refuses to ever falter under the weight of the profundity of her conclusions. It is as if we are watching Rankine balance on a tightrope that transgresses the grief of being alive in a world where so many buckle. She asks us to regard the enormous pain of those we consider to be our 'Other' and also recall the people we have left behind in what we hope might be our now evanescent past lives. Here her genius returns home and takes on the deepest questions of our spirits and the time we live in."--Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

About the Author