Citizen: An American Lyric Claudia Rankine

Citizen was a New York Times best seller.[7]

The book received rave reviews from The Adroit Journal,[8] Bookforum,[9] The Boston Review,[10] Brevity,[11] The Guardian,[12] The Independent,[13]The New York Review of Books,[14] The New York Times,[15]The New York Times Book Review,[16] The New Yorker,[17] Publishers Weekly,[18] The Seattle Review of Books,[19] and Slate.[20]

Dan Chiasson, in the New Yorker, wrote that "[Citizen] is an especially vital book for this moment in time. ...The realization at the end of this book sits heavily upon the heart: 'This is how you are a citizen,' Rankine writes. 'Come on. Let it go. Move on.' As Rankine's brilliant, disabusing work, always aware of its ironies, reminds us, 'moving on' is not synonymous with 'leaving behind.'"[17]

Booklist,[21] Kirkus,[22] The Oxonian Review,[23] Shelf Awareness,[24] and The Washington Post[25] provided positive reviews, as well.

Kirkus called Citizen "[f]requently powerful, occasionally opaque."[22] In The Washington Post, Michael Lindgren wrote, "Part protest lyric, part art book, Citizen is a dazzling expression of the painful double consciousness of black life in America."[25]

The book was ranked the greatest literary work of the 2010s by Literary Hub contributors.[26]

In a reflection ahead of its tenth anniversary, writer Lisa Teasley wrote: "Yet Citizen: An American Lyric continues to be deeply, unsettlingly relevant. It captures the unequal recognition of belonging that Black citizens in white America receive. By using second person, Rankine brings us into the feelings of invisibility and hypervisibility produced by these situations."[27]

Awards and honors