So people who know me, or who have ever met me, know that I read a lot and think a lot and ideas stick with me and I like to talk about books I've read in conversation. It's like having a conversation with footnotes! I don't know if people are interested in what I read and think about, but just in case there are people who are interested, I'm trying something new, cautiously dipping my little toe into the water...blogging! Or blogging sort of. Basically I just want to tell people about books, and maybe sometimes what I'm thinking about.

I read Claudia Rankine's book Citizen: An American Lyric a couple of years ago, soon after it came out in 2014. But it has stayed with me. It's prose poetry. It's a moving, intimate description of the experience of being on the receiving end of racism and feeling how it affects you and the people you interact with, friends and strangers. Reading it is an adventure in empathy. Incidents are recounted along with internal, visceral, subjective reactions, thinking and questioning. The reader is taken on a journey of painful experiences accumulating into a kind of heaviness.

Here's a quote from the book:

"The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you.
 It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard."

So I'm recommending this book to you, and maybe there is someone in your life you would like to recommend it to. 

Love,

Elizabeth