The award-winning poet powerfully explores an America that increasingly struggles to process its own toxins. Available for the first time in the UK, the book in which Claudia Rankine developed the form of 'American Lyric Poetry', which makes her award-winning collection Citizen so distinctive: an original combinatorial analogy of poetry, lyrical essay, photography, and visual art, skillfully utilized. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is Rankine's reflection on a self confused by racial conflicts, terrorism, pharmaceutical depression, and the omnipresent influence of television. Written in the years following September 11, it is an unrelenting and deeply moving meditative quest for life and death in a country in transition.