English

1. Rankine addresses “you” throughout the book. Where do you recognize yourself in the encounters described in Citizen, if at all? What perspectives or angles of experience were you surprised to inhabit, and why?

2. Discuss Rankine’s use of the pronoun “you” in the incident of middle school cheating (pp. 5-6) or the time a neighbor called the cops on the babysitter (p. 15). How does the perspective or point of view from which Rankine narrates this incident change your experience of it? What do you learn about yourself from being addressed as “you”? What do you learn about the speaker? What questions does the incident raise for you?

3. What is the relationship between the image on p. 6 (Jim Crow Rd. by Michael David Murphy) and the two prose poems that are placed before and after it? Consider the following: the significance of the image on its own; the physical placement of the image between the poems—the white space on the page between written text and image; how the image comments on each poem individually and together. What does the image communicate that hasn’t been articulated by the written text?