Triage

A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the bestselling 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, Rankine shifts into new registers of sustained narrative, memory, art criticism, and lyric essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing to date.

Triage follows the turbulent friendship between the narrator and the theorist—unnamed but real self-identified sisters who struggled to define their wounded histories and their shared and separate lives. During college, they invented a game of collapse: every time they saw each other, they both had to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continued off and on again for decades, “collapse” took on new dimensions of meaning seen and experienced in the violence of their pasts, in artworks depicting Black figures in states of exhaustion, in the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and in the antagonism of their conversation and their love for one another.

Triage becomes an essential argument for both the necessity of seeing and grieving and the demand for conviction and 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’ve unexpectedly come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.