Born in Portland, Oregon, poet Camille Rankine earned a BA at Harvard University and an MFA at Columbia University. She has served on the staff of the Cave Canem Foundation. She lives in New York City, where she teaches at and directs the Manhattanville College MFA program, serves as editorial director for the online literary journal The Manhattanville Review, and sings with the band Miru Mir. Rankine’s nimble, urgent poems are often concerned with landscape, history, and intimacy.
More By This Poet
Symptoms of Prophecy
In the new century,
we lose the art of many things.
For example, at the beep, I communicate
using the wrong machine.
I called to say we have two lives
and only one of them is real.
When the phone rings: you could be anybody.
In the...
History
Our stone wall was built by slaves and my bones, my bones
are paid for. We have two
of everything, twice heavy
in our pockets, warming
our two big hands.
This is the story, as I know it. One morning:
the ships came, as foretold, and...
The Current Isolationism
In the half-light, I am most
at home, my shadow
as company.
When I feel hot, I push a button
to make it stop. I mean this stain on my mind
I can’t get out. How human
I seem. Like modern man,
I traffic in extinction. I...