Nothing in Nature is Private

Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; Plot; The End of the Alphabet; and Nothing in Nature is Private. In 2014 she was a National Book Award Finalist and also received Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, awarded to an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition. Rankine co-edited the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, and her work is included in several anthologies, including Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, Best American Poetry 2001, Giant Step: African American Writing at the Crossroads of the Century, and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry. “Claudia Rankine is a fiercely gifted young poet. Intelligence, a curiosity and hunger for understanding like some worrying, interior, physical pain, a gift for being alert in the world. She knows when to bless and to curse, to wonder and to judge, and she doesn’t flinch. Nothing in Nature is Private is an arrival. It’s the kind of book that makes you hopeful for American poetry.” –Robert Hass “I am excited by Claudia Rankine’s poems, their elegance, their emotional force, their scrupulous intimation of multiple identities. Representing brilliantly the prismatic vision of a Jamaican, middle class, intellectual black woman living in America, they address the widest constituency of readers. This is a richly rewarding collection.” –Mervyn Morris More Information: Claudia Rankine Website Poetry Foundation Poetry Daily/jubilat New Yorker Bomb Magazinehttps://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clpc_bks/1119/thumbnail.jp