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. Item number: 31735067554166

In 2011, a poem published in a national magazine by a popular white male poet made use of a black female body. A conversation ensued, and ended. Claudia Rankine subsequently created Open Letter, a web forum for writers to relate the effects and affects of racial difference and to explore art's failure, thus far, to adequately imagine. Born in Kingston, Jamaica,Claudia Rankine is author and editor of more than six collections of poetry and poetics. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a professor of English at Pomona College. Beth Loffreda is author of Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-gay Murder. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Wyoming. Item number: 31735067568760

Understanding the current moment in poetry can be a difficult task, as the reader must sort among the avant-garde and mainstream, the traditional and the experimental. A welcome introduction to contemporary poetics, this collection represents one of the first attempts to chart the progress of a new generation of poets. Each chapter focuses on one poet, and includes a selection of poems, a brief statement of purpose by the poet, and a critical essay by a notable scholar. Poets include: Joshua Clover, Stacy Doris, Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Myung Mi Kim, Mark Levine, Tracie Morris, Mark Nowak, D.A. Powell, Juliana Spahr, Karen Volkman, Susan Wheeler, and Kevin Young. Item number: 31735056036399

In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone. Item number: 31735056135472

Is writing marked by gender and if so, how? What does it mean to be experimental? How can lyric forms be authentic? This volume builds on the energetic tensions inherent in these questions, focusing on ten major American women poets whose collective work shows an incredible range of poetic practice. Each section of the book is devoted to a single poet and contains new poems; a brief "statement of poetics" by the poet herself in which she explores the forces -- personal, aesthetic, political -- informing her creative work; a critical essay on the poet's work; a biographical statement; and a bibliography listing works by and about the poet. CONTRIBUTORS: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Harryette Mullen. Item number: 31735045147158

In her third collection of poems, Claudia Rankine creates a profoundly daring, ingeniously experimental examination of pregnancy, childbirth, and artistic expression. Liv, an expectant mother, and her husband, Erland, are at an impasse from her reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world. The couple's journey is charted through conversations, dreams, memories, and meditations, expanding and exploding the emotive capabilities of language and form. A text like no other, it crosses genres, combining verse, prose, and dialogue to achieve an unparalleled understanding of creation and existence. Item number: 31735059498828

These poems -- intrepid, obsessive, and erotic -- tell the story of a woman's attempt to overcome despair. Drawing on voices from Jane Eyre to Lady MacBeth, Rankine welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque, courting paradox into the center of her voice. Item number: 31735039746791

The work of contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) hits hard with a powerful mix of lived life and social commentary. Since the late 1970s, her photographs, films, and installations have become known for presenting realistic and authentic images of African Americans while confronting themes of race, gender, and class. This book, the first major survey of Weems's career, traces the artist's commitment to addressing issues of social justice through her artwork. Her early photographs, which focused on African American women and families, have since led to work that examines more general aspects of the African diaspora, from the legacy of slavery to the perpetuation of debilitating stereotypes. Increasingly, she has broadened her view to include global struggles for equality and justice. This beautifully illustrated book highlights over 200 of Weems's most important works. Accompanying essays by leading scholars explore Weems's interest in folklore, her focus on the spoken and written word, the performative aspect of her constructed tableaux, and her expressions of black beauty. Item number: 31735064848868

Weems explores the human rights movement in the United States and abroad in this volume devoted to her multimedia installation "Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment." Item number: 31735059731368

Brings together photographs from Frances B. Johnston's Hampton Album of 1900 with a related series of images by renowned contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems. This remarkable book examines the work of two women, distanced by time and race, yet joined by their shared interest in a unique educational experience. In "The Hampton Project, she knits her concerns about individual identity, class, assimilation, education, and the legacy of slavery into a series of photographic banners that force viewers to reassess their own moral and ethical boundaries, as well as the political and socioeconomic realities of twentieth-century America. Weems's Hampton Project is shaped in part as a response to vintage photographs of the historically black Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Hampton, Virginia, and period images of, African Americans and Native Americans, as well as to Frances Benjamin Johnston's celebrated" Hampton Album of 1900. Her gaze is broad enough to encompass initial contacts between Anglos, African Americans, and Native Americans, the institution of slavery, the era of Jim Crow, the civil rights conflicts of the twentieth century, and the land claim disputes of the present. Item number: 31735072385606

Carrie Mae Weems brings together for the first time five of her most accomplished and powerful groups of work: the Sea Islands Series (1991-92), the Africa Series (1993-95), From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96), Who What Where When (1998), and Ritual & Revolution (1998). These series, composed mainly of photography and text, highlight the themes that have dominated Weems's work over the course of her twenty-year career: identity, race, gender, class, the legacy of slavery, and the African diaspora. Item number: 31735043181001

This anthology takes us beyond the status of masculinity itself, questioning society's and the media's normative concepts of the masculine, and considering the extent to which men and women can transcend these stereotypes and prescriptions. Item number: 31735039498310

An exhibition catalogue of Weems's photographs in South Carolina and Georgia at the University of Alabama Sarah Moody Gallery of Art. Item number: 31735036491821

Published on the occasion of "Carrie Mae Weems," the United States component of the 10th Dakar International Biennale [sic], Senegal. Item number: 31735062197581

The catalog for a traveling exhibit of Weems's photographs, sponsored by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The 50 photographs, mostly black-and-white, deal with the life of contemporary Afro-Americans, especially women. Item number: 31735030607083