Being susceptible to depression by contagion, I am not big on texts, music, movies and art claiming to speak to our overwhelmed, modern condition. (As we said back on the school bus, "Speak to this!")

That said, like most New Yorkers, hell, most U.S. citizens, I took the events of September through December 2001 fairly hard, post-trauma panix steez. If the passenger missile didn't get you, the aerosolized anthrax will see you in a moment; whoever left open sacks of confectioner's sugar around midtown and on the subway tracks, God loves you.

So anyway, I came to Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely with modest expectations. I hadn't really connected with her in print, and the one reading I'd been to what lively language I heard sounded forced. Still, a dozen great readers had mentioned her as one to listen for, so I took her tall-format book out of the pile of new review copies first.

"There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died." Monosyllables. At the top of a block of prose. With death at the end of the sentence. I flipped through the book -- prose, with pictures. Sections marked off by an image of a tv showing static. I backed up a page. I've never been able to sit all the way through Poltergeist and I likely won't ever see The Ring or White Noise but I know what that no-image means. I reread the first line, and this time it wounded (meant to say sounded) like a voice-over at the top of a program you can't tell whether will be standard Hollywood emotional smog or the kind of documentary that makes you spontaneously change your plans for the night.

When Ezra Pound wrote that poetry must be at least as well-written as prose, he took advantage of the fact that people don't agree what well-written means, or even what kinds of experience of reading to evaluate. Do you read for an even and subtly-varied prose rhythm? Paragraphs that run downhill from a lofty topic sentence to several glittering details? Just gimme ten courses of the chef's best insights, with some palate cleansers and a little savoring time built in? Or maybe you go for Shklovskyesque bluntness -- all brutal paradox, no filler. (Me too.)

Rankine writes well. She writes sentences that I imagine readers from anywhere NPR broadcasts or the New Yorker is available will recognize as good writing. At the same time, her uncompromising approach to dark subjects, from depression to terrorism, from the slaughter of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas to the 39 pharmaceutical companies who filed suit against the manufacture of generic AIDS drugs, will endear her to anyone left who is counting on poetry to testify that somebody in this country still has a soul.

It would be useful at this point to provide the diagram on Page 90, in which the liver is shown resting on the stomach, which feeds into a large intestine the shape of the United States. I don't have a scanner, sorry.

Over lunch, someone says,

What's all this about detaining hundreds of people and monitoring lawyer-client conversations? Who do we think we are? China?

Inside the space of the constructed joke, everyone laughs and laughs.

I'm not crazy about phrases like the space of the constructed joke -- to paraphrase the Hold Steady, I lived through the 90s once already and I don't recall them all that fondly -- but I experience these traces of theoryspeak Rankine leaves more as a sad acknowledgment of the belated failure of the academic left than as the status-stabbing that I used to feel in work I otherwise wanted to admire.

How it feels to have an artificial heart, the surprise we all felt when that maniac Rudy Giuiliani expressed a human emotion, the awkward impossibility of sharing the grief of the bereaved and the dying, the resigned bafflement we all felt at the remorselessness of Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden; in short, all the strange and new emotions of the recent past are collected here.

I know that one of the conditions of depression is to be stuck repeating depressing ideas; in a review of the Al Pacino 'Merchant of Venice' in the London Review of Books, Frank Kermode mentions that "It was said that not to know its cause was a symptom of melancholia." To pursue those causes is one kind of therapy. If the next time you clean out your medicine cabinet you find a three-year old scrip for Cipro, remember the name Claudia Rankine and go speak to your librarian or bookstore manager. Reading, after all, forms a kind of community, which while it won't instantaneously and effortlessly transform the world, will help you keep your sense of humor. Not a bad consolation at all.