Triage (Graywolf Press/ Allen Lane) by Claudia Rankine, the newest work from the critically lauded Jamaican-American poet and essayist, is a composite publication melding the genres of memoir, literary criticism, biography, and lyric essay. Triage explores the frayed relationship between two former friends, now marked by decades of silence, while paralleling their ruptured bond to the ever-unravelling state of the world around them. A commentary on modern cultural life and its dissolution, as well as a contemplation on the boundaries and borders of intense human kinships, the book represents both Rankine’s virtuosity and technical skill.