I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter.

The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric and the essay in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity—of thought, imagination, and sentence-making—while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.

Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.