Killing Floor
By Ai
1979
First Published
4.32
Average Rating
64
Number of Pages
Poetry. In 1978, Killing Floor was awarded the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. The book was selected by Charles Wright, Maxine Kumin, and Philip Levine.
Avg Rating
4.32
Number of Ratings
117
5 STARS
52%
4 STARS
34%
3 STARS
9%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads
Author
Ai
Author · 11 books
Ai Ogawa (born Florence Anthony) was an American poet who who described herself as 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw-Chickasaw, 1/4 Black, 1/16 Irish and as well as Southern Cheyenne and Comanche. She is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, as well as for taking on dark, controversial topics in her work. While her poems often contain sex, violence, and other subjects for which she received criticism, she stated during a 1978 interview that she did not view her use of them as gratuitous. About the poems in her first collection, Cruelty, she said: "I wanted people to see how they treated each other and themselves." In 1999 she won the National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.
