Rankine very decisively demonstrates the differences and powers of different person views of writing in relation to communicating the truth about a social condition through a personal experience. Switching from “you” to “I” the point of view changes for the reader and a conscious aesthetic of the invisible is replaced by a real image of the speaker in relations to the reader. This is an important role for the reader to no longer follow but to participate in the movement of the poem as a primary supporter of the speaker.

“You said I has so much power; it’s insane” follows the disclosure that the “pronoun barely holding the person together” is a linguistic interior/exterior concept that becomes destabilized in the practice of the poem. The “I” cannot hold a significant power in a system of racism where it does not belong to the person. This idea of racist development is a subjective aesthetic of the self as a different entity, not belonging to the body. Rankine plays with the different kinds of poetic styles and rules when she mentions how as a poet she has “tried rhyme, tried truth, tried epistolary untruth, tried and tried” and the solution is a collection of different kinds of pieces of writing as in this book. In the first section the lies about how the body is perceived in the public eye, when she refers to Serena’s body that according to the media suggests that her body “should not be in such an ambition.” Rankine describes the moment on television when tennis player Wozniacki imitates Serena’s body and she says, “at last, in this real, and unreal moment,” is where the truth of expression lies in the audience to express their real perception of Serena Williams, the best female tennis player of all time.

In the middle of the poem there is a dialogue of an imaginary presence. The complexity of the personas in the poem now becomes intriguing as we wonder if there is a third person in the poem or if the poet is directly talking to the reader. “…you are reading minds but did you try?” and then after the poet responses to the question with “I tried…” a voice again says, “never mind our unlikeness, you too have heard the noise in your voice/anyway, sit down. Sit here alongside.” The sensibility that the reader is present in the poem implies a complicated bridge between text and reality that persists throughout the whole text.

For Rankine, poetic self reflection seems to be in the language and the suggestions of how the reader perceives the political/social issue of individuality in a racist world that denies its own racism. The assimilation between poetic expression and political references creates a context in her poetry that reminds the reader of previous poetic conventions of context-politics-voice sort of narrative. What I mean is that the “I” in this poetry even though personal in it’s sensibilities it is a political figure with the awareness of a system in place. “You could build a world out of need, or you could hold everything black and see” suggests that in order to create, the poet makes a direct conscious decision to bring the reader to a world that is real.

Of course the reader cannot ignore the image at the bottom of the page between sections of the poem. A black page with a sort of medieval statues of common gargoyles and a woman sitting on a pedestal is facing half the other section of the poem. The reminder that this is a differential text in the ways that the compositional methods of poetic expression are aided by the images it produces. This image is not mentioned in the poem, nor does it reflect the meaning of the poem but it does create a mystical sense of loss from a time past. The woman has wings and at the bottom of the page a monk or saint, is in a praying position. This image is small but very powerful as it presents images that are familiar to the reader as well as the insertion of the black woman with wings as an angel of some sort. The image becomes a source of conceptual dialect between the past and present. “Yesterday called to say we were together…” is the first line of the next page until the poem proposes three questions. “Is this you?” and later, “whose are you?” is not really answered in the poem. Even though there is a voice answering we are not sure if this an imaginary dialogue or a real instance… “Yes, it’s me, clear the way, then hold me clear of this that faces, the storm carrying me through dawn…” there is action in the other presence and power to control events. The poem looses its straightforwardness and becomes a bit chaotic at times. This is perhaps the poet’s central analysis of the subject of self and race and the identity of the poet.