Triage

Name: Triage
Brand: Graywolf Press
SKU: 9781644454008
Price: 33.60 USD
Availability: InStock

$33.60

Product Variants

Biographical Note:
Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. She is the award-winning author of Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Citizen, and Just Us. A MacArthur Fellow and professor at New York University, Rankine lives in New York City.

Review Quotes:

"Rankine is a literary icon, so it's no surprise that she's found ways to blend genres and formats into her next book. . . . Rankine explores the backdrop of violence that has only intensified in recent years, as well as the love that keeps us together in emotionally numbing times."--Harper's Bazaar, "The 25 Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2026"

"The ever genre-fluid Rankine braids criticism, memoir and more in this illustrated story of two women whose lives diverge and reconverge over decades."--The New York Times Book Review, "The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026"

"Claudia Rankine is fearless. . . . We need her."--Los Angeles Times, "20 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2026"

"Rankine is one of the most eloquent and incisive poets and essayists of the contemporary Black American experience. . . . A remarkable, soul-stirring work."--Lesley Williams, Booklist, starred review

"An innovative, genre-defying mix of narrative and criticism. . . . [Rankine] demonstrates how a complicated friendship can force self-reflection and change. It's a thought-provoking response to a broken world."--Publishers Weekly

"A celebrated poet asks how to live. . . . Illustrated with politically resonant artworks, Rankine's lyrical melding of memoir and criticism poses urgent questions." --Kirkus Reviews

"Claudia Rankine has a poetic voice like no other. Her lines, freighted with political urgency and psychic acuity, profoundly question the validity and viability of 'these truths, ' whether spoken in faith or twisted out of shape. Rankine's body poetic refuses the compromises and consolations of the body politic. If Citizen was Rankine's American lyric, Triage is her elegiac anti-memoir of 'these times.'" --Homi K. Bhabha

" Triage is a stunning book. In this blend of essay, memoir, fabulation, and criticism, the intimate encounters between the narrator and the theorist offer an extended meditation on the collective devastation of the present. The body bears the weight of this brutality and violence and collapses under the burden of all that we are forced to carry. To yield, to break down is a self-interruption and a letting go, a gesture of survival. The collapse is the embodiment of our shared desolation, an act of dwelling with the tombless and the unwept, a recognition of our destitution. The beauty of Rankine's dense, elliptical sentences guides us through this ruination." --Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

" Triage is transfixing. What Claudia Rankine achieves here seems almost impossible, utterly daring, and full of risk. This book is a masterwork, faultless and taut, that stitches together a fractured, aching world with precise and subtle language that refuses to ever falter under the weight of the profundity of her conclusions. It is as if we are watching Rankine balance on a tightrope that transgresses the grief of being alive in a world where so many buckle. She asks us to regard the enormous pain of those we consider to be our 'Other' and also recall the people we have left behind in what we hope might be our now evanescent past lives. Here her genius returns home and takes on the deepest questions of our spirits and the time we live in." -- Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

"Claudia Rankine's remarkable, outstanding odyssey--an account of our present, which is also our past, which is always our future--is beautifully rendered in a kaleidoscope of images and sensations. This book rewards the reader with the sense that life, as we encounter it day in, day out, often leaves us with the certainty that words are only the beginning and maybe they might never be enough. Triage is exquisite and, frankly, it is at this moment important--for this moment is always right now." --Jamaica Kincaid, author of A Small Place

"At the center of Triage is a ritual of collapse and tentative recovery, of giving way and getting back up. In Claudia Rankine's writing, we feel traditional genres buckle under the catastrophes of the present--and then she shows us how new possibilities of form and feeling might emerge. There are no false consolations in this book, but there is the rare and quickening sense that our language, our literature, has been enlarged." --Ben Lerner, author of Transcription

Publisher Marketing:

A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling 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, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.

Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, "collapse" takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.

Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for 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 come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.

Review Citations:

Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2026 (EAN 9781644454008, Hardcover)
Publishers Weekly 05/11/2026 (EAN 9781644454008, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:Rankine, Claudia
Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.