Sin

No contemporary poet penetrates characters like Ai. The farther they are from her personal experience (Jack and Bobby Kennedy, a priest, a holocaust survivor, the Atlanta child murderer) the more vivid the transformation. Bathed in "a harsh and purifying light/that keeps nothing whole," myth, theology and history rise hot as nightmare through her radical imagination. Battered women’s bruises shimmer like stigmata; Joe McCarthy defiles a dead Stalin. Every poem pushes at the boundaries laid down in Cruelty and Killing Floor, the two books that established her singular control, an authority so absolute it looks casual. Violence is Ai’s natural habitat, but blood, she reminds us, "sanctifies and blesses." Essential for academic and larger public libraries. —Rhoda Yerburgh, Adult Degree Program, Vermont Coll., Montpelier

Blue Suede Shoes
Conversation
The Death Of Francisco Pizarro
The Detective
Elegy
The Emigre
The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981
Immortality
The Journalist
Kristallnacht
The Man With The Saxophone
More
The Mother’s Tale
The Priest’s Confession
The Prisoner
Saint Anne’s Reel, 1870
Salome
The Testimony Of J. Robert Oppenheimer
They Shall Not Pass
Two Brothers