Over at BOMB, Claudia Rankine takes a look at the way we use our words:

Tone is an everyday kind of maneuver. It disrupts and communicates aggression, disgust, dis- respect, and humor, among a myriad of possibilities, thereby allowing language to morph into a blanket or a gun. It helps me know how to read the spaces between things. One has an ear out for it always. It’s a thing to be translated.

Lauren Berlant delivers the rest of the interview; the two chat about poetic structure, the blank space between moments, and Rankine’s latest collection, Citizen.