Claudia Rankine’s Triage asks what truth can do in an age of disaster
In a new review, The Guardian Books says Claudia Rankine’s latest work blends memoir, fiction, criticism and lyric writing to confront political violence, climate catastrophe and the problem of how to speak about them. At its centre is a friendship between two idealistic college-era activists, used to test how people respond when reality itself feels unstable.
A book built on uncertainty Claudia Rankine’s new book, *Triage*, is framed by a disclaimer that immediately undercuts any easy divide between fact and invention. As The Guardian Books notes in its review, the author states that any resemblance to real people or events is “purely coincidental” — “Unless it isn’t.” That deliberate contradiction signals a work interested less in tidy genre boundaries than in the difficulty of describing a world marked by crisis.
Rankine, the Jamaican-American poet, essayist and playwright, uses that ambiguity to press on a central question: what should literature do when the realities it tries to describe seem to outrun the language available for them? The review says the book ranges across memoir, fiction, criticism and lyrical lament, drawing from both Rankine’s personal history and a global landscape shaped by fascism, deportations tied to Great Replacement theory, war and climate-driven starvation.