Don't Let Me Be Lonely is a multi-media book of poetry and photography by Claudia Rankine. It was originally published in September 2004. Rankine is a contemporary poet who is known for her idiosyncratic, politically-charged, and multimedia writing. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an evocative meditation on American identity, loneliness, mental health, and death. Rankine uses a vulnerable and authentic voice to examine existence in America at the turn of the 20th century, particularly when it comes to American consumption of media, gender and race politics, and the aftereffects of 9/11.
Don't Let Me Be Lonely was received very well by literary critics in the months following its publication. In 2005, Rankine won an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Star Tribune lauded Don't Let Me Be Lonely as a means through which we as readers "can make ourselves present—to separate our consciousness from the droning media that drowns out life's possibilities." The Yale University Library Gazette, in a rare academic review of a contemporary poetry reading, described Rankine's tone at her reading in 2006 as "gently elegiac." The Yale University Library Gazette also noted that, in her talk, Rankine "spoke of the 'aesthetics of sadness,' often undercut by American culture." In 2006, Ira Sadof published a literary study on Don't Let Me Be Lonely in The American Poetry Review entitled "On the Margins" that lauds Rankine's work as "one of the most adventurous, ambitious, and uncategorizable uses of the prose poem form." Finally, poet Robert Creeley writes on the poignancy and beauty of Don't Let Me Be Lonely: "Claudia Rankine here manages an extraordinary melding of means to effect the most articulate and moving testament to the bleak times we live in I've yet seen. It's a masterwork in every sense, and altogether her own." Creeley's praise of Don't Let Me Be Lonely was printed on the back cover of the book, which was published by Graywolf Press.
In 2014, Rankine published Citizen, which, like Don't Let Me Be Lonely, is an extended multi-media prose poem. Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen are similar in their formal characteristics as well as their examination of American society and its implications on the individual. However, Citizen departs from Don't Let Me Be Lonely by focusing specifically on racial hierarchy and white supremacy in the United States, including police brutality and politics. In both works, Rankine reveals herself to be a poet that is deeply attuned to and focused on the particular political moment at the time of writing, in order to "[keep] present the reality of our history," as she said in 2016. Rankine uses the contemporary moment as her source of inspiration when writing her poetry. This creates works that demand to be understood according to their historical context, which is something that we will be paying very close attention to throughout the rest of this guide.
