Early in Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, the narrator recalls a conversation with a friend who was dying of cancer. They discussed the films Boogie Nights and Magnolia at great length, she recalls, and agreed that both films depict feelings of bitter disappointment created by absent father figures. She notes that one of Magnolia’s characters shares her name (Claudia), and that this character also suffers from bitter disappointment. She notes that cancer did not come up in her conversation about Magnolia with her friend, but it was a part of Tom Cruise’s character’s life in the film.
If you’ve seen interviews with Paul Thomas Anderson about Magnolia, you might remember him describing the film as an adaptation of Aimee Mann’s songs. He had all the film’s characters buzzing around in his head and the first line of her song “Deathly” gave him a way to bring them together: “Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing each other again?” The song is a desperate request from someone who fears for people with whom they get involved. It’s sung by a person hiding a great deal of pain and insecurity, like all the characters in Anderson’s film.
The two main characters in Claudia Rankine’s newest book of prose poetry, Triage, are also connected by pain. These characters, the narrator and “the theorist,” meet in a class on Hegel in college, drawn together by the theorist’s defense of Antigone against the “familial prison” that Hegel puts her in. Triage looks back on their decades of friendship from the present moment, when the narrator and the theorist are both in their sixties.
Like many literary depictions of friendship, Triage traces a winding, unpredictable story of a relationship sustained by choice. The narrator and theorist’s initial meeting opens worlds that neither could have imagined alone. They share music and books and together create “a third space, the space of possibility.” As the years pass, they communicate sporadically and fall out of step at times. They exchange confusing text messages and feel silently judged by each other. Their friendship creates “a feeling, more or less, of disquiet.”
It may be misleading to say that Triage arranges these moments into a “story” and more accurate to say that it does to story what Citizen and Just Us do to nonfiction: makes it poetic and opens it up to new ways of seeing. It does this partly by repeatedly circling back through images and developing them in new, unexpected directions. One of the book’s central metaphors is that of collapse, stemming from a game that the narrator and the theorist create when they are in college: whenever they see each other on campus, they must immediately fall to the ground. The narrator offers multiple ways of understanding the game’s origins: it reflected brokenness, refused continuance, disallowed surrender. She acknowledges that collapsing probably meant different things to her and the theorist. The word “collapse” means different things when it’s used in different places throughout the book.
Triage also continues Rankine’s strategy of weaving text and image together, creating a third space of possibility from their contact. Rankine has described this approach as an attempt to create portraits from the text, encouraging readers to feel as though they are walking through a gallery as they read. Triage does feel like walking through a gallery at times, not least because of its full-color images and glossy pages. But it refuses a sense of poetic or curatorial control. Instead, the book’s words arise gradually from imaginative encounters with art objects, works of literature, internet memes, and song lyrics. The narrator pays particular attention to art works involving couches, such as Rosemarie Trockel’s uninviting, plastic-coated sculptures or Uta Barth’s washed-out photographs. She feels that a “symmetry persists in a couch’s function to receive and our need to fall, as our mouths grab at air, as if breath will be the last breeze to rouse us.”
The phrase “It’s not going to stop” does a lot of work in Triage, particularly its second half. It first appears when the theorist and narrator recall Cory Booker’s speech during Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Senate confirmation hearing. After reminding the audience of the degradation and belittlement Judge Jackson faced during the hearing, Booker added, “It’s not going to stop.” The narrator and theorist recall that Judge Jackson began to cry—collapse, they say—at this moment. As two Black women who have suffered similar belittlements and degradations throughout their lives, the narrator and theorist also begin to cry, creating an important moment of connection between them.
The phrase reappears in the final interaction between the narrator and theorist, when the theorist challenges the narrator to define how she’s responding to the targeted violence of our present moment. The narrator warily replies that she’s responding by “understanding it’s never going to stop,” but this comes after she’s refused the theorist’s request to house refugees from Gaza. The theorist leaves disappointed, and the narrator is left questioning the value of poetic practice in the face of violence and suffering.
Readers who have seen Magnolia or heard Aimee Mann’s song “Wise Up” may recognize “It’s not going to stop.” In the song, it’s part of a speaker’s attempt to accept that failed expectations and disappointments are not fixable conditions but simply the makings of a human life. In Magnolia, the characters suddenly sing along with the song towards the film’s end, connecting them not only in disappointment, but also as creations of Paul Thomas Anderson’s imagination. Shortly after the singalong, the film ends with an uncertain hope that love can help broken individuals meet the disappointments of their lives. Just before the credits roll, the Claudia character looks into the camera, seemingly asking viewers how they respond to their own disappointments, maybe wondering whether the film they just watched will help.
Triage ends with a similar moment of self-reflection, but it doesn’t offer the same possibility of comfort. The book’s final pages contain a series of isolated, paragraph-sized groupings of text in which the narrator tries to make sense of her decision to refuse the theorist’s request. At times, Rankine’s text sounds like Wallace Stevens as it tries to generate language from absence. “No living allows for this loss. All living is loss.” “Casualties inform and form.” But Rankine’s language lacks Stevens’ confidence. It takes its doubters too seriously.
Throughout the book, the narrator and theorist use Antigone to understand their lives. They see themselves as the title character, bravely standing up to injustice; or as Ismene, loyal but uncertain in support of her sister. But in the book’s final pages, the narrator recasts herself as Polynices, Antigone’s slain brother whom the king declares unfit to receive burial rights. At this late point in Triage, the narrator merely wants to embody renunciation rather than define an active response to injustice. “We are all the unburied dead,” she writes. “No matter our posture, we are all among the rubble.”
The book’s language diminishes even further in these pages, eventually shrinking into isolated sentences separated by dashes. “All the clothes are black because grief inters—All my clothes are black because our ghosts live in our throats—We are in our throats—All our ghosts are black—” These images of black clothes, ghosts, and throats reappear from earlier in the book, but they’ve been stripped of context and recombined in random ways. The rhythm and sound of the language create a feeling of static noise interrupted by occasional glitches. The final passage does not end with a period. The language has collapsed.
As a reader, I want to make these last pages “amount” to something meaningful—to gesture towards some desirable political arrangement or communal possibility. The narrator admits to a similar desire earlier in the book when she reflects on her collapsing and asks, “Towards what?” But she knows this desire is misplaced. “This question was as mist,” she replies, “clouds enveloping the theorist with me, our form of we. The droplets that made up the atmosphere loosely bound us. For me, this mist kept rusting the will.” On its final pages, Triage embodies this rusted will. It offers the opportunity to honor its renunciation. It opens a space to refuse the violence that constitutes so much of the characters’ worlds and our own. Then it looks to its reader and asks what they will do with the opportunity they’ve been given.
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Triage
By Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press
Published August 4, 2026
