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3.to prepare oneself for something difficult or unpleasant; from the story: the narrator says the lyric "places you inside the body that has already learned to brace" — the body that carries the system's readings in its shoulders and wrists, before the sentence arrives. The body that braces is the body that has learned, through repetition, that the system's violence is coming. The lyric catches the moment before the brace.
7.a statement, action, or incident regarded as an indirect or subtle form of discrimination against members of a marginalized group; from the story: the narrator describes a series of scenes — the neighbor's name-slip, the coffee shop comment about hair, the therapist's first question — as ordinary events that are also microaggressions. Rankine's book is built out of these moments because the microaggression is the form the system takes in the everyday.
9.able to be read or interpreted; from the story: the crowd at the US Open has decided the player's body is "legible only as a category — a Black body, a female body, a loud body, an angry body." Legibility, in Rankine's book, is what the system imposes on a body: it reads the body according to its own categories, not according to the body's own account of itself. The lyric is the counter-move: it makes the body legible from inside.
10.a curved path; figuratively, the overall shape or trajectory of something across time; from the story: the narrator describes the unit's "arc across all four lessons" — from India to South Africa to the Dominican diaspora to the American lyric — as a movement not in geography but in where the system lives: from the law, to the hearing room, to the curse, to the body. The arc of the unit is the arc of the system's migration across forms.
11.of mixed character; combining different elements; from the story: the narrator describes Citizen as a "hybrid text, the poem that holds the essay that holds the photograph that holds the sports analysis" — a form that refuses to stay inside a single genre because the system it is describing refuses to stay inside a single site. The hybrid form is the counter-argument to the system's categories.
12.a form of poetry that expresses the thoughts and feelings of a speaker in a compressed, musical form; from the story: the narrator's teacher explains that "the lyric is the only form that can hold this kind of violence — the kind that arrives in the ordinary, that does not leave a bruise." The lyric's compression is what allows it to hold a moment that a narrative or a legal finding cannot.
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1.of or relating to grammatical address that uses "you" to speak directly to the reader or listener; from the story: the narrator identifies Rankine's second-person address as "not a style choice. It is a claim about who has to see this" — the "you" is a structural argument that the reader is inside the system, not observing it from outside. Second-person is the lyric's mechanism for making the reader a witness.
2.of or relating to the way something is built or organized; from the story: the narrator uses "structural" twice — once for the "structural choice" of the second-person address, and once for Rankine's "structural argument" that the lyric is the only form that can hold quiet violence. Both uses point to the same idea: the form of the book is itself an argument about the system.
4.one who sees and can testify; from the story: the narrator says that Rankine's "you" makes the reader "the witness — not watching a person experience the microaggression, but inside the body experiencing it." The witness in Citizen is not an observer; the witness is the body that the system is working on. Rankine collapses the distance between witness and subject.
5.the state of being involved with others in wrongdoing, or the quieter state of being involved with others in a system one has not chosen; from the story: the narrator implies complicity in the crowd at the US Open — the crowd "had an opinion about her shoulders, her legs, her arms" — and in the reader who has been sitting in the crowd without seeing what the crowd is doing. Rankine's second-person address makes the reader's complicity visible.
6.a rhetorical or grammatical mode of speaking directly to a specific person or group; from the story: the narrator describes the end of the Citizen excerpt as "a direct address" that says to the reader: "the court is not in New York. The court is in the body. The body is yours." Direct address, in Rankine's hands, is the moment the poem stops describing the system and starts locating it in the reader's body.
8.language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect; from the story: the narrator says Rankine's "you" is "not rhetorical" — it is not a persuasive device but a structural one. The distinction matters: a rhetorical "you" flatters the reader; a structural "you" places the reader inside the body the system is working on. Rankine is not persuading; she is locating.