A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author ofCitizenandJust Us

Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebratedAmericantrilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.

Triagefollows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, collapse takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.

Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. No matter our posture, Rankine writes, we are all among the rubble. This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.

Claudia Rankine is the author ofCitizen: An American Lyricand four previous books, includingDont Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in theGuardian, theNew York Times Book Review, theNew York Times Magazine, and theWashington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor ofPoets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publish Date: August 4, 2026
• Pages: 136
• Language: English
• Type: Hardback
• EAN/UPC: 9781644454008
• Dimensions: 25.4 X 25.4 X 25.4 mm | 1.0 pounds
• BISAC Categories: Literary Fiction