The early poems here-the ones in Cruelty ( 1973) and Killing Floor (1979)-are intricate and forceful. The best ones are learned, ambitious, drawing on such diverse traditions as Pound, the Oral Tradition, Browning’s Monologues and Post Second Wave Feminism. Obsessed with trauma and agonizingly internal, they can raise powerful questions about race, gender, identity and the human capacity to digest an enormous amount of grief. Even when the message or structure of the poems don’t necessarily jibe, they are consciously crafted enough to always be the readers time.
She loses me In the later poems, where she stops telling human personal stories and starts to ruminate on pop culture events and figures. Ai's early work interpolated the motif of the early Cantos- that poetry didn’t have the language to encapsulate the grief and horror of modern life-more effectively than Pound ever did, but they worked when she wrote close to the vest of real life, what she knew, what she could see, what she could invent. When she started writing about OJ, Monica Lewinsky, Koresh, and the Okalahoma city bombing, the animating aesthetics of her work fall flat. Still, the book is worth it: there is much here that needs to be read if you want to understand the history of poetry, chew on some literary theorizing, or just read some good poems. If you can get a good copy of Cruelty on Amazon, however, I would go with that first.
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