The End of the Alphabet

By Claudia Rankine

Book Overview

These poems -- intrepid, obsessive, and erotic -- tell the story of a woman's attempt to overcome despair. Claudia Rankine, whose first collection was the prize-winning Nothing in Nature is Private, creates a transfixing testimonial to a woman facing her own disease. 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802116345
• ISBN13: 9780802116345
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

An engrossing, challenging read.

The language in this book is compact and highly charged, yet seems to run parallel to circumstances, as opposed to intersecting them; the actual events are relegated to the coincidental. It is as if the reader were being guided into a dark basement, the speaker wielding the flashlight, determining what is to be seen and what must simply be sensed. Lines such as "rip the mind out. go ahead," and "...our lives umbilical, tied up with living with how far/we can enter into hell and still sit down for Sunday dinner," leap off the page as starkly as a beam of light piercing the dark and falling onto a dreadful shape. The End of the Alphabet boldly explores the mysterious hinterlands of what poetry can be: an attempt to negotiate that indeterminate realm between experience and language.

Extraordinary poetry.

This is one of the best modern poetry books I've read. It is moving and powerful. I read the book straight through and then started again. This book, to me, is what poetry should be - language that effects one at a level deeper than concious understanding.