The End of the Alphabet

by Claudia Rankine

Overview

With a new introduction by Calvin Bedient

Claudia Rankine’s second poetry collection, The End of the Alphabet , is an inquiry into despair and recovery, selfhood and alienation. Centered on a heroine named Jane, these poems—obsessive, intrepid, erotic—speak in the aftermath of a life-altering tragedy, attempting to make peace with loss and find redemption through mourning. Rankine writes with unflinching attention to exterior detail and emotional nuance, as well as with linguistic and formal innovation, crafting an extraordinarily powerful, utterly unique portrait of sorrow and strength.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802124470
Publisher:	Grove Atlantic
Publication date:	07/14/2015
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	417,618
Product dimensions:	5.57(w) x 8.22(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Pomona College.

What People are Saying About This

Robert Hass

A fiercely gifted young poet....She knows when to bless and to curse...[and] makes you hopeful for American poetry.

Editorial Reviews

"Nothing is so impressive in The End of the Alphabet as this poet's ability to sustain over one hundred pages an examination of pain so sensitive, so painstaking, that it nearly outdoes the exquisiteness of the pain itself, its superinventive, invasive, and pervasive 'life.' Here, wits at once keen and tenacious match themselves against grief's genius." — Boston Review

"What fuels this collection is the emotional current and urgency of the writing. . . . This is a long look into the enervating dark of a postmodern soul fissured by loss. But this is not so much a depressing celebration of darkness as it is an attempt at healing." — Ploughshares

"Harrowing and hallucinogenic . . . Rankine's is a singular voice . . . one must admire the risks she takes." — Library Journal

"It is not facts or events but the experiencing of them that counts here. And the writing never summarizes or reduces these to simples, leaving them instead in the full complexity in which they are encountered. In the amazing subtlety of even everyday contexts lie extraordinary intensities, and it is these that Claudia Rankine has discovered. In her writing, dailiness has the eloquence of the diurnal." — Lyn Hejinian

From the Publisher