In Part 15, the speaker discusses Mahalia Jackson. The speaker goes on to say that when she was in the third grade she always wondered whether or not the characters she saw on TV were dead in real life.

It also adds different points of view through which the speaker can digest the events of the work. We see a shift in the speaker's voice in Part 1 and Part 2. Instead, it uses the recollections and musings of the narrator, each of them their own scene, to paint a picture of American identity as Rankine understands it in 2004. This is another death of a person that the speaker did not know well. He was grieving his

The speaker reveals that she wishes she could give these pills away to someone who had the will power to get rid of them. Two of her saved channels are one that shows independent movies and HBO. In Part 13, the speaker moves into a discussion of 9/11 and its aftereffects. While publicly talking about the brutal killing, Bush could not recall some of the most basic facts about the crime. She says that the response to the election will continue this feeling of "American optimism." Don't Let Me Be Lonely [There was a time] - There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died - The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. She suggests that maybe her lack of hope is indicative of something wrong with her character and diagnoses herself with "IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope" (23).

resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Heightening this feeling is what comes in between the request and the reply: on one page, we find a picture of a static-filled television; on the next comes a scene in which the poet is listening to her sister, who has just lost her children and husband in a car accident. There, she reveals a profound nihilism. The passage I came across on was (Rankine 39) the way people mourned for Princess Diana and how they addressed their grief towards her death was the way that I’ve have mostly commonly seen which would show … The lyric poem is introduced as a "dialogue" by the speaker. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine. Don't Let Me Be Lonely study guide contains a biography of Claudia Rankine, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. In Part 5, the speaker tells the story of a girl who is mistaken for being suicidal when she climbs on the roof of a building to escape the heat. In Part 11, the speaker tells the story of Richard Tools, who was the first man to ever receive an artificial heart. As the speaker's friend with Alzheimer's is dying, he requests that the speaker put "the lady that deals with death" on the TV. Don't Let Me Be Lonely essays are academic essays for citation. The speaker's doctor also prescribed pills that the speaker can use whenever she feels like she needs them. She switches off the news when she can no longer take listening to the election results because they cause her to lose hope. The x-ray of the friend's tumor and the logo on the DNR form are visceral elements of the account of her death. The work was written in 2004, four years after the election of Geroge W. Bush into office. GradeSaver "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Summary". Additionally, when the speaker discusses Spaghetti Westerns, she muses on the difference between dying and dying before your time (24). Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Loneliness" (5). The book of poetry and prose vignettes opens with author Claudia Rankine as a child witnessing her father looking flooded, leaking, breaking, broken. Her father had to fly to Jamaica for her funeral. The speaker tells us that the friend's tumor was misdiagnosed by doctors a year before her eventual diagnosis. She questions whether this is what condemned her friend's life. Following this, there is an image from a Spaghetti western enclosed in a TV screen. To close Part 1, the speaker tells the story of a friend of hers who was diagnosed with breast cancer.

These images draw a parallel between the process of reading Don't Let Me Be Lonely and the experience of watching TV. The doctor doubles the dosage and the speaker runs out of pills within a week.

In Part 4, the speaker watches commercials for antidepressants when she can't sleep. When the ambulance attendant arrives 15 minutes later, the speaker tries to explain that she is not suicidal and instead is experiencing a lapse in "happily." Trying to understand the tragedy of New Orleans, my mind reaches for poetry and brings me back to a passage from Claudia Rankine’s book-length prose poem Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. She then has a dream that she is at a party hosted by the Kennedys. The TV is showing nothing but white noise.

It also shows us that the voice in Don't Let Me Be Lonely is not fixed or changeless. In Part 16, the speaker celebrates her fortieth birthday. The first section opens on a scene with the speaker's mother and father. It seems right to the speaker that antidepressant commercials would appear most at night since the people who would be watching them would be more aware of the message on the TV as well as their own anxieties. Trying to understand the tragedy of New Orleans, my mind reaches for poetry and brings me back to a passage from Claudia Rankine’s book-length prose poem Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.In the passage reprinted online as an excerpt in Boston Review, Rankine writes about James Byrd Jr., the black man who was dragged from the back of a pickup truck in Texas during George W.’s governorship. Edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, Copyright © 2020 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. The speaker asks, "Can we say she might have lived had her doctor not screwed up? The speaker reveals she does not know what changed about the situation. Despite the fact that he had demonstrated a lack of interest in defending the rights of black Americans, Bush's approval ratings were at 68% in 2002 (Gallup). These shifts add lightness to an otherwise very emotional and revealing section of Don't Let Me Be Lonely. in the scene about her friend with Alzheimer's (17). The speaker describes these pills as red and small. When she goes to the pharmacy to get more, the pharmacist tells her that she cannot give her more medication. After two weeks, the speaker feels like they are not working. An interesting thing to note about Part 4 is the shifts in form. She visits the site of the twin towers a few days after the terrorist attacks and takes note of the destruction. The speaker learns the suicide hotline phone number from the television: "You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o'clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: '1-800-SUICIDE'" (7). The speaker tells us that the tumor that would eventually kill her friend was misdiagnosed by doctors a year before. This news coverage will ignore the fact that Bush could not remember how many people committed a racist attack in Texas, where he is from. A Prescription Against Despair: On Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Erik Anderson In the long wake of 9/11, I have often wondered what poetry can say about our country’s internal violence as well as the violence we export abroad (in the form of neoliberal … Mass media often presents violence, suffering, and other catastrophic events as singular incidents, frozen in time and disconnected from the myriad of complex relations that contribute to the ongoing flux of worldly existence. Week Eight: 27 March 2014 Claudia Rankine titles her exploration of America during the dawn of the twenty-first century and her discovery of the self Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.