A list of Black Americans dead as a result of police violence is included on page 134, and updated by the author on some reprintings.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 167-168).

You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary movement, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating sounds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition--Back cover.

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society--Publisher's description.

New York Times Best Seller ; Winner of National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry ; Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry ; Finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award in Criticism ; Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, 2014

National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 2014

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