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Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good? Go to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

Well, I've read a very interesting book.

It's published by Fence Books, and once again, Claudia Rankine is my guest.

It's an anthology co-edited with...

I co-edited the anthology with Beth LaFreda and Max King Cap.

It's called The Racial Imaginary, Writers on Race in the life of the mind.

The book was stimulated by a series of poems by various poets

that wrote about black women in highly satirical degrading fashion,

and when confronted, the poets would say,

well, that's my imagination, that I have the right to my own imagination and therefore the term the racial imaginary.

Can you define it better for me?

I think I was really interested in how race shows up in literature because Because one of two things happened.

Well, probably one of many, but one of two.

...