Avant‐Garde Difficulty and the Shape of Claudia Rankine's Poetic Career.

This article examines the evolution of Claudia Rankine's poetic career, focusing on her shift from early avant-garde, formally difficult poetry to a subtler, more accessible experimentalism exemplified in her later prose poetry trilogy, including *Citizen: An American Lyric* (2014). It argues that despite a marked stylistic change around the early 2000s, Rankine's work maintains a persistent experimentalism that reconfigures lyric conventions, particularly through innovative uses of pronouns and address to explore structural antiblackness. The essay situates Rankine's career in comparison with contemporaries Ben Lerner and Elizabeth Willis, highlighting how their shared avant-garde training diverges along lines of race and formal choices, with Rankine's shift toward plain style reflecting both aesthetic and political considerations. Ultimately, the article proposes reading Rankine's oeuvre as a dynamic career shaped by a "volta" or turning point, where complexity is preserved beneath apparent simplicity, challenging conventional notions of poetic difficulty and lyric subjectivity.