Vice -- Ai

The powerful draw of the poetry collected in Ai's Vice is in the pull of language. Aggressive language. Language that is not afraid to push bounds or offend. The horror ensnares the reader making even the most horrifying of subjects, of personas, alive. The first three books in her collecton, "Cruelty," "Killing Floor," and "Sin" take on personas of victims and aggressors, midwives and a man on the receiving end of an abortion.

Ai opens "Cruelty" with "Twenty-Year Marriage" in which she takes on a persona exploring the sexual side of a two decade old marriage. She opens it with, "You keep me waiting in a truck" immedeatly grounding the reader to a place and a situation, along with the progression of time. The annonymous persona urges her husband, "Hurry. I've got nothing on under my skirt tonight" and the reader learns about the inner drives, the inner emotion of the persona. In a sense, Ai opens the intamacy of the persona with the reader. The language is alluring as the poem continues, "Come on, baby, lay me down on my back" and mixes age and time with the sensuality of the persona, "and maybe we'll roll out of here, / leaving the past stacked up behind us; / old newspapers nobody's ever got to read again." Ai begins opens her collection of poems with seduction, a beckoning of the reuniting of the past and the present. And her language pulls the reader in.

In the poem "Child Beater" (found in the "Cruelty" collection) Ai takes on the persona of an abusive father figure. This demonstrates a stretch of poetic talent, not only humanzing a dark side of human nature, but also by her ability to step into the position of another sex and a twisted character. To an extent, it becomes too much for my personal taste. The violence and imagery is overpowering as evidenced by the first stanza:

"Outside, the rain, pinafore of gray water, dresses the town
and I stroke the leather belt,
as she sits in the rocking chair,
holding a crushed paper cup to her lips.
I yell at her, but she keeps rocking;
back, her eyes open, forward, they close.
Her body, somehow fat, though I feed her only once a day,
reminds me of my own just after she was born.
It's been seven years, but I still can't forget how I felt.
How heavy it feels to look at her."

Time and age are established. However, the persona (which could stem from this being an unreliable persona) offers little defense for his abhorrent actions. The dehumanizing descriptions of what the persona does to the little girl character are almost too overbearing. The why is never answered.

However, a fairer assessment could be that there are just too many successive persona poems for a reader to handle in one sitting in the first three books of poems collected in Vice.

Ai covers a variety of personas and topics as she explores the grimmer sides of the human condition. In "The Detective" (found in "Sin") she widens the perspective to include a mythological reference to Persephone from Greek mythology. The poem opens with the calling of a mother to her daughter; the reader knows this is the mother's tale. And like Ceres from ancient myth, this persona is mourning:

"I like on my daughter's body
to held her in the earth,
but she won't stay;
she rises, lifting me with her,
as if she were air
and not some remnant
of failed reeducation
in a Cambodian mass grave."

The contemporary horror of the time period meets the allure of myth. Themes of death and resurrection, contemporary politcs and military history merge and undulate with myth and mourning. A mother recalls her dauther, "like Persephone / climbing rom the underworld" and meditates on the devastation of Cambodia and Vietnam because "somewhere in time, it is 1968."

One of Ai's strengths is her ability to capture time and command the words to bring historic past alive, mixing it with fiction and truth as poetry forms on the page. It is something I'd like to have a stronger handle of in my own work -- especially as I develop persona poems. Her fearlessness of the subject dangles on the page, lurching the reader into unexplored terrors and hidden truths of the mind.