The award-winning poet's powerful exploration of an America ever more unable to process its own toxins

Here, available for the first time in the UK, is the book in which Claudia Rankine first developed the 'American Lyric' form which makes her Forward Prize-winning collection Citizen so distinctive: an original combination of poetry, lyric essay, photography and visual art, virtuosically deployed. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is Rankine's meditation on the self bewildered by race riots, terrorism, medicated depression and television's ubiquitous influence. Written in the years after 9/11, this is an unflinching and deeply felt meditation on life and death in a nation in flux.

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and the bestselling Citizen: An American Lyric. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is the winner of many prizes including the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship. She is an adjunct professor of English and African-American Studies at Yale University, and has previously taught at Pomona College and the University of Southern California.