Your September Shelf Improvement choice is… Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine The book: As our 2015 year of Shelf Improvement draws towards a close, we thought we’d try something a little unusual (bear with us!). It stretches some definitions of non-fiction a little, of that we are aware, but Citizen: An American Lyric is such a powerful and unique work, and is engaged with such a meaningful subject - contemporary racism in Western societies, including the UK - that we hoped you would appreciate our attempt to bring something different but special to the non-fiction table.

Bringing essays and images together with poetry, Citizen is a blend of voices from the heart of what race and racism means today. A meditation on the violence experienced by Mark Duggan meets sharp vignettes of everyday prejudice.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in America, Citizen was also simultaneously a finalist in the criticism category, the first book ever to be considered under both labels. Our aim is to give you books you love, as well as open you to surprises. We hope that Citizen delivers on both accounts.

What the Guardian thought: Claudia Rankine’s achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an unsettled hybrid – her writing on the hard shoulder of prose. Through brief encounters and troubling retellings of recent news, Rankine puts one, as a white reader, on constant alert for any unconscious racism in oneself. Rankine reminds us there is nothing black and white about black and white. And there is nothing slight about the slights described here. They have the force of body blows. A scene on an aeroplane is a particular shocker. It involves no noisy spoken insults but the sickening, faux tact of a whispering mother who spares her daughter from having to sit next to a black passenger. If she is going to be racist, the mother knows she must be what she believes to be discreet. But a need for specificity is satisfied in the horrific stories she tells of the racism suffered by tennis champion Serena Williams: “Neither… God nor NIKE camp could shield her ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their world.” She gives a powerful account of what Williams suffered at the hands of unsound umpires and a bigoted press. The question about whether – and how – to speak out persists. There is an equally shocking piece about hurricane Katrina in which the emergency services are less than urgent. She reports that the lives of black people in the disaster were less valued than those of the rescuers. There is so much anger and anguish here that you wonder how it can be contained. But what is wonderful about Rankine’s writing is that it works like an out-of-body experience: she encounters her subject full-on and rises above it. And she never loses her wide-angle reach. Above all, she shows how racism itself gets relegated. In a piece about Mark Duggan, killed by police in Tottenham in 2011, she describes meeting a novelist in a house in Hackney. He has “the face of the English sky – full of weather, always in response, constantly shifting, clouding over only to clear”. But they have the following exchange. He asks: “Will you write about Duggan?” She throws the question back: “Why don’t you?” He says: “Me?” and looks “slightly irritated”. She could not make it plainer: racism is everyone’s problem. Until this is understood, she will be forced to keep writing as she does here: “I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending.” Kate Kellaway Read the full review: www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/30/claudia-rankine-citizen-american-lyric-review

If you liked this, then try:

• Ghettoside: Investigating a homicide epidemic by Jill Leovy • Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo • The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan

We hope you enjoyed Citizen. If you’d like to be kept up to date with Shelf Improvement and the books we’re talking about each month, please email us at shelfimprovement@theguardian.com to be added to our mailing list.