The Verb explores the art of conversation with Claudia Rankine, one of America's most innovative poets. She has just published her sixth poetry book 'Just Us' a work that combines poetry, poetic prose, images and marginalia, allowing them to speak with, to, and across each other.

At a time when political conversation in the USA has been criticised for having too much heat and not enough light, Claudia Rankine explores how a poet's ability to navigate silences, stutters, and the endings of poems, can bring truth-telling and resilience to difficult encounters - especially to conversations about whiteness, inequality and friendship.

She also shares with Ian the early influences on her writer's ear: the work of the poet Emily Dickinson, the novels of Louisa May Alcott, and the poetry of Adrienne Rich.

Claudia Rankine won many awards for her last book 'Citizen- An American Lyric', including two National Book Critics Awards and the Forward Prize. One of Citizen’s reviewers, the critic Kate Kellaway, said it was 'a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an unsettled hybrid – she eavesdrops on America and a racism that has never gone away.”