This response is a kind of general reflection on Rank’s work. As the reader moves between Rankin’s lines, s/he notices the oscillation between first person pronoun (I) and second person pronoun (You). Rankin by the use of (I) is clearly involved in some of the scenes she projects, but what about YOU? It seems that YOU refers to an external audience, but this audience is not identified. It is not clear whether Rankin has a specific audience in her mind or a large scale of audience. I don’t think that she invites the audience who share her the same race because they are familiar with the experiences that she write about. It seems rather that she address those people who are unaware or different to these experiences. She call these readers imagine themselves in the situations she portrayed, and then to reflect immediately and urgently on their reactions to them. This premise leads to the assumption that margins left in some pages under the stories are allocated for the reader to write down his reflection or commentary.

One more thing about Rankin’s poetry is that are tend to be sung. As I read, I felt that she is singing these lines which are full of emotions. This characteristic make her poetry effectively provocative. Her poetry is also situational. It comes out the spur of the moment in connection to a certain circumstance accompanied by the feelings, behaviors and events linked to this situation.

Rankin’s poetry atmosphere is apparently gloomy. Her poetic lines are infused with anger and despair. This trend is attributed to the kind of issue she tackles in her poetry, which is racism toward black people. However, she deploys this issue in a plain and simple, but political language. The final observation about Rankin’s poetry is her incorporation of sports as potential mediums in which racism is practiced. She recurrently refers to the case of Serena Williams, a well-known American ‘black’ tennis player and the case of the Algerian team in World Cup 2006.