Claudia Rankine, known for genre-defying work that blends free-form prose, critique, essay writing and art, published her newest work “Triage” in Aug. 2026. She is an expert at beading forms, which I first discovered in 2022, when I read “Citizen: An American Lyric”, the most successful of Rankine's American Trilogy. The book blends poetry and essay, forcing readers to confront racism embedded in modern American culture. By addressing the audience as “you” throughout, the issue is made more personal.
Rankine describes “Triage” as “an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our age of relentless love.” Operating as a semi-autobiographical examination of Rankin herself, the book follows the narrator's lifelong friendship formed in college with the Theorist, a character who embodies the many women Rankine has encountered in her career and life. The pair find themselves drawn together through a shared interest in activism as they form a ritual around collapse, falling to the ground together when they cross paths on campus. For the narrator, collapse is a translation of internal burdens to the world, while the Theorist sees it as a protest. Though they approach grief and struggle quite differently, the collapse is shared, and the ritual keeps them tied for decades.
The juxtaposition of the narrator and the Theorist is a reference to “Antigone” by Sophocles. Throughout, the characters map themselves to the sisters Ismene and Antigone, one cautious and the other rebellious. In an interview with Jane Ratcliffe, Rankine explained, “I wanted to tell the side of Ismene. I have never felt that she loved her brother less, or grieved less. But it’s a different mode of existence, a different level of terror in terms of the state.” In “Triage”, the narrator, who sees herself as Ismene, is not propelled to action. Instead, she finds herself frequently needing to rest on the couch.
Rankine deploys a recurring reference to couches as a place of rest and collapse. Once she and the Theorist grow apart and are unable to fall together, the couch fills in for the narrator. Rankine focuses on the couch as a place that softens and postpones an inevitable fall, but mostly as a place from which one can rise up again. Throughout the book, “toomuchness” describes the feeling of the world that compels the narrator to collapse, but the fall is essential to continuing. “For me, the collapse is a recognition. Because, especially for African Americans, we’ve been asked to carry on in the face of everything … And I’m like, no, no, no, no, no. Stop. Recognize that this is unreasonable. It’s unbearable. It’s devastating. You have to stop and grieve it,” Rankine said in the same interview. She does not make the couches out to be entirely peaceful; instead, these pieces of furniture are essential to endure today’s world.
The pivotal couch reference in the book is to Jennifer Packer’s painting “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!).” In the portrait, which Rankine includes in the center of the book, a Black man lies on his pale green couch in a pale green room, embodying the grief and exhaustion the narrator knows too well. Packer found inspiration for the painting while looking at pictures of Breonna Taylor’s home. “I was scrolling through these images, I saw things that I recognized, things that I would have seen in my own apartment.” Packer said in an interview with the Serpentine Gallery in London. I could almost conflate a time in my life materially to what I was seeing in hers. I felt this sense of connection,” The narrator shares the same feeling when she comes across the piece in the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Rankine is able to pull you into her critiques and poetry, while placing readers back in reality with mentions of prominent tragedies and news headlines that contextualize her work and remind that what she writes about is the world she inhabits every day. The big question and divide between her and the Theorist is that the narrator feels that action is vital but is unsure whether it is her responsibility. It is a story about seeing and being seen in our world. Rankine said, “The narrator understands that the layers of both the emotional and the physical positioning of a person is tied to both the knowledge and the knowing. She wants to be open to all of it, to come forward. But also to receive that back from the theorist.”
