On the train the woman standing

“Brown Love” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2020)

“Brown Love” shares several characteristics: Both poems use long lines and some disrupted grammatical structures; both poems address racism in travel; and both poems use a particular point-of-view to create a specific feeling for the reader. In contrast, “Brown Love” uses the first-person plural “we” and “our” to describe events, which creates a different scenario than Rankine’s “you.”

“It Bruises, Too” by Kwame Dawes (2022)

In this one-stanza poem, Dawes’s speaker is an unknown “journeyman” (Line 6) traveling through a seemingly metaphorical space. There is a second person in the poem whom the speaker addresses but does not define. The location of the two people is hazy, which is somewhat similar to the structure of Rankine’s “[On the train the woman standing],” where precise location is implied and allegorical.

“Visa” by Solmaz Sharif (2021)

This philosophical and personal poem addresses a different angle of racism in travel, describing the moments in which a close relative approaches arrival to a new country, only to be stopped in customs. The title of the poem is addressed in the piece itself, creating a new way to think about the word “Visa.