1999
First Published
4.10
Average Rating
272
Number of Pages
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.
Avg Rating
4.10
Number of Ratings
518
5 STARS
43%
4 STARS
31%
3 STARS
20%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
1%
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.
