Greed for money, power, sex, and love is the theme at the heart of this new volume of dramatic monologues by Ai, her fifth book to date. Beginning with "Riot Act," a monologue about the Los Angeles uprising in April 1992, this collection is an exploration of racial and sexual politics through the voices of characters as diverse as Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald, J. Edgar Hoover, a battered wife who shoots her husband, an adopted child involved in an incestuous relationship, a priest-pedophile, and women in relationships that are going nowhere. Ai's particular gift is her ability to get inside the heads of the characters she writes about; the cumulative effect is no less shocking than the personal and public horrors we read about in the daily newspapers.

Greed

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

W.W.Norton

In a compelling anthology of poetry, the National Book Award-winning author of Vice reflects on the nature of evil and on America's loss of innocence in poems that range from the terrifying flight of a World War II pilot and the death of JFK Jr. to the World Trade Center attack and the poet's own illegitimate birth.

Dread: Poems

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

A collection of poems from Ai's first four books also contains seventeen new poems that continue her gift for dramatic monologues that capture, in a searing and unforgettable fashion, the experiences of ethnic minorities and the urban poor.

Vice: New and Selected Poems

United States

“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.

The Collected Poems of Ai

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

W.W.Norton&Company

A searing new collection from a master of the poetic monologue. A disillusioned Irish nun moves to America, meets Elvis, and rediscovers her faith. An amputee goes on a strange journey during a hurricane. Each of the speakers in Ai's daring new collection has a uniquely American story to tell, and each is told with the poet's characteristic dark humor and ambition.’ From "Brotherhood" Now we're middle aged, Bearing the curse, not the luck of the Irish, On our shoulders like crosses. We know that loss is just the outcome of living, The dross that's left after you turn gold back into iron And end up in Rio with a mulatta, who's got a habit, But he doesn't care. He's flying blind And I am right behind him.

No Surrender: Poems

Greed for money, power, sex, and love is the theme of this volume of dramatic monologues by the poet the New York Times Book Review has called "one of the most singular voices of her generation." Beginning with "Riot Act," a monologue about the Los Angeles uprising in April 1992, Ai explored racial and sexual politics through the voices of diverse characters.

Winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry.Collected here are poems from Ai's previous five books? Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and Greed? along with seventeen new poems. Employing her trademark ferocity, these new dramatic monologues continue to mine this award-winning poet's "often brilliant" (Chicago Tribune) vision.

A searing collection of poems about America's loss of innocence from the National Book Award-winning author of Vice. In poems that travel from the horrific flight of a World War II pilot to the World Trade Center attack, from the death of JFK Jr. to the poet's own bastard birth, Ai conjures purity as a distant memory and the knowledge of evil as an "infinite dark night." "An undoubtedly powerful personae."―Publishers Weekly "Ai's cleansing soliloquies give voice to pain both personal and communal....[Dread] presents her most masterfully unnerving works to date."―Booklist "Dread has the characteristic moral strength that makes Ai a necessary poet."―The New York Times Book Review

"Smart, funny, angry, political, and utterly poetic . . . both haunting and humorous." ―The Rumpus

When Cruelty was published in 1973, I read the collection repeatedly, transported by the mystery in the poems and by the politics of gender on almost every page. The way the first poem in the collection, "Twenty-Year Marriage," opens is a clue to this poet's psychology: "You keep me waiting in a truck / with its one good wheel stuck in a ditch, / while you piss against the south side of a tree. / Hurry. I've got nothing on under my skirt tonight." The speaker's insinuation is calculated. The intentional, invented tension breathes on the page. She has our attention. But Ai knows-like any great actor-that language and pace are also crucial. Sometimes a poem may seem like personalized folklore, a feeling culled from the imagination. The characters hurt each other out of a fear of being hurt, and often they are doubly hurt. Do we believe her characters because they seem to evolve from some uncharted place beyond us but also inside us? They are of the soil, as if they've always been here; but they also reside on borders-spiritually, psychologically, existentially, and emotionally-as if only half-initiated into the muscular terror of ordinary lives. All the contradictions of so-called democracy live in her speakers. Most of the characters in Ai's poetry are distinctly rural, charged in mind and belly with folkloric signification, always one step or one trope from homespun violence and blasphemy. What first deeply touched me in Cruelty is this: Ai's images-tinctured by an unknown folklore-seemed to arise from some deep, unsayable place, translated from a pre-language of knowing or dreaming with one's eyes open, as if something from long ago still beckoned to be put into words Yusef Komunyaka

Cruelty: Poems

Houghton/Mifflin

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Books by AI

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Greed

Dread: Poems

Vice: New and Selected Poems

The Collected Poems of Ai

No Surrender: Poems

Greed

Vice: New and Selected Poems

Dread: Poems

No Surrender: Poems

Cruelty: Poems