Keynote
A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just Us
Book Title
Triage
Cover Image
“Over the years, Rankine’s work has raised crucial cultural questions, most insistently: How much are people actually willing to see themselves, to change? Her new book has something of an answer for that. . . . Rankine’s act of vulnerability is powerful, admirable, even as it elicits discomfort.”—J Wortham, The New York Times Book Review
Body
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 collapse: 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.
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 collapse: 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.
List Price
$28.00
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About the Author
Credit: Dirk Skiba
Praise
“Few writers manage the range evident in Claudia Rankine's tapestries of poetry, theory, history, memoir, fiction, occasionally even illustration—as in her latest book, Triage, which offers a fittingly multifaceted portrait of a long friendship.”—Colin Dwyer, NPR.org
“A tough, sophisticated, and personal work.”—Emma Alpern, Vulture
“Triage is colorfully, referentially, and intellectually dynamic.”—Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe
“Claudia Rankine is fearless. . . . We need her.”—Los Angeles Times, “20 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2026”
