The End of the Alphabet: Poems

By Claudia Rankine

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080212447X
• ISBN13: 9780802124470
• Release Date: July 2015
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.6" x 8.2"

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.