On the train the woman standing

There is no formal form and meter in the poem, no specific repeated starts or line lengths, and sentence structure is also not parallel in most cases. This style of writing is consistent with other works by Rankine; in this poem, she uses the form of the poem to enhance the emotional impact of its scenes.

The poem’s appearance is at odds with the narrative style: Though it appears that Rankine composed the poem in paragraphs, the speaker is inconsistent in her phrasing and descriptions, often turning phrases on themselves and including questioning remarks. This implied unreliability is important to the meaning of the poem; Rankine’s speaker is confused internally yet attempting to organize her ideas linearly. In US culture, direct communication is considered valuable, which often acts to the detriment of other cultural ways of expressing ideas. By subverting the traditional prosaic form of the poem, Rankine challenges common assumptions of how one should write a poem and how one should communicate ideas.