Claudia Rankine's "Citizen: An American Lyric" is the most sustained contemporary engagement with the body politic, treating the Black body as a document of racial history that is read, misread, and violated by a society that cannot see it as simply human; A poet engaging the body politic might write about the experience of being followed in a store, stopped by police, or excluded from public space, showing how everyday encounters reveal that Black bodies are always already political objects in white-dominated spaces; Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "The Bean Eaters" engages the body politic subtly by showing how poverty is written on and into the bodies of elderly Black people through the material conditions of their lives; Etheridge Knight's prison poems make the body politic explicit by showing how incarceration marks, disciplines, and attempts to destroy the Black body as a deliberate exercise of state power; A student poet working with the body politic might write about the medical racism experienced by Black patients, connecting historical experiments on enslaved people's bodies to present-day disparities in pain management and diagnosis; Patricia Smith's "Blood Dazzler" engages the body politic through Hurricane Katrina, showing how the bodies of poor Black New Orleanians were rendered invisible, disposable, and undeserving of rescue by the racial logic of the American state