Review by Booklist Review
Ai is the queen of poetic monologues. Her new collection of unsparing, often headline-inspired recitations continues the potent series that includes Vice (1999), Greed (1993), and Fate (1991) and presents her most masterfully unnerving works to date. Ai tightrope-walks the fine line between intense sorrow and psychosis as her protagonists shift from memories to self-mythologizing, from observation to delusion. The destruction of the World Trade towers inspires some extremely moving poems. In one, a woman policeman, called Officer Girlie on the street, searches the huge, rubble-filled crater for her beloved brother; in another, a woman prone to dementia goes to the site pretending to search for her sister, who may or may not have drowned years before. Ai understands intimately how traumas warp a life, and each of her revealing poems revolves around dire occurrences: an unwanted pregnancy, childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, racism, suicide, thwarted love and illicit lust, and, in a striking cycle, "The Psychic Detective," murder. Explicit, audacious, and empathic, Ai's cleansing soliloquies give voice to pain both personal and communal. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A delusional woman insists that her long-dead sister perished in the destruction of the World Trade Center; John F. Kennedy Jr. speaks from beyond the grave; a psychic detective tracks a serial killer known as "The Florist"; an adoption broker exalts his dubious trade-these and other striking, violent or baroquely sexual life stories fuel this seventh volume of verse from Ai (Greed; Cruelty), made up (like her others) of dramatic monologues and character-based confessions, in which shocking, pathetic, frustrated or odious figures explain how they came to be the people they are. Ai (who won the National Book Award for 1999's Vice) explores her own Texas African-American heritage along with urban and Native American milieus; she's especially good with disillusioned middle-aged women and traumatized children, whom she ventriloquizes expertly: "Maybe Danny's only playing dead too/ and there's no gash in his head"; "Before I knew what was happening/ pain shot a fiery bullet into my arm." After six books of painful monologues, some readers may find her speakers' language limited, or their situations redundant; many, however, will gravitate to the undoubtedly powerful personae Ai creates, with their gender troubles and criminal pasts, their "inferno of family violence" and "rush/ of promises," and "reparations/ in pounds of flesh." (Apr.) Forecast: Though she may not command the attention she drew in the 1970s, Ai retains a broad, devoted following, reinvigorated by her National Book Award. Look for broad if brief coverage in mainstream venues, perhaps led by her 9/11 poems. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Ai, a Lamont Poetry Award winner, continues to purvey her special brand of poetry, addressing everything from a daughter's night out to the burning Twin Towers in blunt, colloquial language. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
