Claudia Rankine's "Citizen" Flies Up The Charts After Showing Up Trump!

The New Republic headline sucks, so I won't use it.
https://newrepublic.com/minutes/124386/poetry-one-winner-trump-presidency

"After a photo of 23-year-old Johari Osayi Idusuyi reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—a poetry collection exploring themes of racial justice—at a Donald Trump rally went viral, the book shot up the charts. On Amazon, the book went from a sales rank in the mid-1000s to #23—66 spots ahead of Trump’s Crippled America. This weekend, the book, which was published by Minnesota’s Graywolf Press, hit the New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List at the tenth spot, 13 months after it was released. (Citizen has been on the list before—it is widely believed to be the only book of poetry to have ever appeared on the Nonfiction List.)

Asked if the book got a boost from its unexpected appearance behind Donald Trump, Rankine’s editor Jeff Shotts told me, “It would be hard to say otherwise.” But Shotts wasn’t surprised: The book, he told me, has become a symbol “for clear thinking about race and about what it means to be a black or brown body in this country ... that is ringing true for many, many people.”

Shotts also attributed the book’s success to its experimentation, particularly its use of the second person, which “is so powerful in terms of putting all of us—it’s literally you—into these situations.” That voice can help readers empathize with—if never quite truly comprehend—“what it means to position oneself in terms of a black or brown body, and also what it means to daily live with the exhaustion of racial micro-aggressions pointed toward you.”

This morning, Graywolf approved an 11th printing of Citizen, which will bring it to over 100,000 copies in print. But the independent not-for-profit publisher isn’t going to rest on its laurels. “We’re going to start a huge campaign,” Shotts joked, “for people to read our books behind every presidential candidate.”


The more people who read this fantastic work, the better! And good for Graywolf, too. They put out quality stuff!