The Collected Poems of Ai - Hardcover

Ai

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393074900 ISBN 13: 9780393074901

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

“Ai is a truthteller picking her way through the burning rocks of racial and sexual lies.”―Joy Harjo

Before her untimely death in 2010, Ai, known for her searing dramatic monologues, was hailed as “one of the most singular voices of her generation” (New York Times Book Review). Now for the first time, all eight books by this essential and uniquely American poet have been gathered in one volume.

from “The Cockfighter’s Daughter”

I found my father,
face down, in his homemade chili
and had to hit the bowl
with a hammer to get it off,
then scrape the pinto beans
and chunks of ground beef
off his face with a knife.

About this title

About the Author:

Ai (1947-2010) is the author of eight books of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Vice. In 2009 she was named a United States Artist Ford Fellow. She was a professor at Oklahoma State University.

From Booklist:

Ai speaks in many voices,making of each poem a dramatic monologue of shocking disclosure. Earthy, furious women. Angry, wistful men. Murderers, rapists, mothers, fathers, children, witnesses, redeemers. The poor, the abused, the displaced, the endangered, the dangerous, the depraved, the compassionate. Her first book was published in 1973, and the titles of the eight collections gathered here in a raucous, confessional, anguished, and bloody chorus—Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, Greed, Vice, Dread, and the posthumous No Surrender—offer a key to Ai’s harrowing subjects and acute moral calculus. Could it be that Ai’s experiences as a person of complex heritage (Japanese, African American, Choctow, Irish) inspired her to take on diverse personae? Born Florence Anthony in 1947, she changed her name to Ai, which means love in Japanese, and annealed love underpins her empathic, emphatic poems. In his penetrating introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa writes of the supreme candor and honed toughness that approach transcendence in Ai’s poems, which, for all their brutal intimacy, span American history, concentrating its conflagrations like sunlight through a magnifying glass, igniting the page. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0393074900
• ISBN 13: 9780393074901
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464