Anything Claudia Rankine writes is brilliant and beautiful. Once I picked it up I couldn't put it down. "Interlude" was my favorite passage. I'll have to read this a few more times; I'm not smart enough yet to completely understand everything as the style is quite complex.

I've given this the once-through. Witty, densely patterned, mischievous. It's about a pregnancy from the mother's point of view, but pregnancy leans into creation in general, so we have an intensely female discourse on creation, parenting, and responsibility, self/other--all those issues of bringing something from the self into the world. I can say all this and yet not feel it viscerally yet. . . let me say that the "metaphorical" surface of pregnancy is pretty thick, such that this un-mother co...

Reading Rankine reminds me not to give oneself up easily. Her writing does not give itself up easily. Plot is ostensibly the narrative of a pregnancy and a birth; a couple, Liv and Erland await their son-to-be, whom they have named Ersatz (the substitute?). Liv’s is a pregnancy experienced from the inside, physically, emotionally, intellectually. Experienced also in the dialog between Liv and Erland, Ersatz’s parents to be. Unspoken taboos are spoken here. Doubts. Fears. Anticipations. “the moth...

Beautifully written but it's about pregnancy and how the different characters dealt with it and it's different stories written in poetry form. Not my cup of tea.

Rankine pushes poetry up against the conventions of art--and then against the conventions of fiction. I've read this three times. Love her use of negative space--love that she tells a story while also lifting up this story towards the lyric.

This is a mesmerizing whirl of motherhood, parenthood, family, love, loss, and artistic expression of unspeakable truths.

After several instances of picking this up and not being able to get into it, I finally really got into it, and it was great. The opening was probably a stronger siren call because I've now had much (much) more personal proximity to pregnancy and birth.I read this mostly all in one sitting, which I recommend. For me, this was a more difficult read than Citizen or Don't Let Me Be Lonely.I was particularly elated to get to the part about Lily Briscoe (a character in To The Lighthouse). Having the

These are fantastic — best poetic representation of pregnancy I've encountered.

Constantly shifting styles & forms balance the permanence of the matter throughout the book. Great poems, especially in sections 2-4, but I didn't find the ending especially strong, particularly compared to the more experimental approaches earlier in the book.

Holy shit Claudia Rankine can write. I love her wordplay so much. This is the story of a couple, Liv and Erland, though it’s primarily the story of Liv - who finds out she is pregnant and isn’t sure she wants to be. Rankine’s description of the baby growing in Liv’s belly are visceral and stunning. The ending as well. The middle sections require a lot of digestion. I spend a lot of time while reading poetry thinking about something I once heard Traci K Smith say, how she asks “what does this bri...

Plot was a solid book of poetry, different in form from both of the other works of Rankine's that I read but maintaining enough similarity that I could sense that it was Rankine's text. Her experiments with punctuation and sentence structure were what frustrated me most - whereas Rankine's other texts usually used traditional grammatical rules and complete sentences, Plot had uncapitalized letters, fragmented sentences, and unneccessary punctuation. This all distracted me from the simple beauty

Plot does indeed feel as though it's the next poetic step to take after The End of the Alphabet. Where Alphabet forced a confrontation between language and feeling, Plot elaborates on that confrontation by offering glimpses of a narrative that creates an arc over the book. In fact, this narrative, with its hard set biological structure (the speaker is living through a pregnancy), has a stability that allows for an even greater accessibility and range to Rankine's more language-oriented statement...

This is the first book where I've had to read the opening section five times. Rankine probably does more with syntax, word order, internal rhyming, and structure in the first few pages than many do in a while book. This book is as masterful as it is powerful. As the collection, which is in sections but could stand alone as its own long poem, follows a character physically and cerebral through explorations of love and family planning.

Unusual format made plot even betterI saw a lot of metaphors in this work. That, in and of itself, is enough for me to read this again and again. But, I also was pleasantly surprised by the denouement. I feared the end. I appreciate the work more, for the twist.

I wasn't expecting Rankine's experimentation to be as intense here, but loved it nonetheless. The exploration of understanding the bodies behind a pregnancy is unique--haven't read anything like it, and am bookmarking it for the future.Second review:I have just finished Rankine's powerful Plot for a second time in the same year. This time I encountered so much more. The river. The Life, cap on the L, where there is potentiality. And the distance as generative and optimistic no matter how much pa...

4.5 really really loved this

Nicely done. She had me on the first page--Submerged deeper than appetiteshe bit into a freakish anatomy. the hard plastic of filiation.a fetus dream. once severed. reattached. the baby femurnot fork-tender though flesh. the baby face now anchored.

A few years back, I was blown away by Rankine's collection, Don't Let Me Be Lonely. That book has lived in my head ever since I read it, and in some ways, it redefined how I thought about contemporary poetry collections. So, knowing that, you can imagine and take into account how high my hopes were for Plot...which didn't really live up to that other reading experience.Another tightly themed and progressive collection, Plot centered on a journeyed discussion of pregnancy, childbirth, related ind...

it's probably amazing but I can't claim to understand it all well enough. fantastic wordplay and therefore also image play. really grateful to have read it now since my niece is pregnant, which is an experience I will never have/

My first exposure to Claudia Rankine and it was a very positive one. This book is great at depicting the perils of parenthood, especially for reluctant and ambivalent mothers. You would think it would be bleak or depressing, but it's somehow neither.