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Triage
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Expected 4 Aug 26A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.
Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.
Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.
Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.
136 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication August 4, 2026
129 people want to read
About the author
Claudia Rankine
52 books1,632 followersClaudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City.
Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including "The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind." In 2016, she cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
(source: Arizona State University)
Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including "The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind." In 2016, she cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
(source: Arizona State University)
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