Vice: New and Selected Poems

This book is an amazing collection of Ai's poetry. She deservedly won the National Book Award for this book. Her poetry touches political and social issues head on and she doesn't back down from her beliefs. Her passion speaks for itself. Her language is easy, conversational. In Blood in the Water, Ai writes in reaction to a very public and very political affair, "My granddaddy told me a man is nothing but appetite/ sandwiched between his wife and mean lust./ I have a deep affection for my wife,..." There is a familiar comfort in the way she writes. This is poetry that affects and is effective. Ai writes with her soul. Her "New Poems" are real to our time, but the earlier works are timeless. Her work, The Gilded Man, is inspired by events from 1561. It reads as if she were there to witness the killing and deaths that happened. She writes of "start[ing] with his feet and giv[ing] them to you to wear as earrings." and it feels like she is there ready to dismember the enemy. Some of her works have the feel of Edwidge Danticat's Krik Krak. Ai, like Danticat, deals with the sufferings of African American people and their ability to overcome hardships. Ai's poem, Cuba, is that particularly reminds me of Danticat's works. Ai casually talks about death and giving back to the earth as if it's second nature. Overall, Ai's Vice is a wonderful collection of poems that are eternal, current and touching in some way or another. The comfortable familiarity of her writing style makes this an easy read, while her passion and beliefs make the book moving and powerful. This collection was deserving of the Award and Ai's work is an amazing reminder that there are modern poets that can still touch us like Hughes and Whitman and Eliot.

Ai writes dramatic monologues, and persona poems. Thematically, her poems will break your nose, knock your teeth out, and leave you feeling slightly off kilter...her unflinching honesty, imagination, and sheer brutality are unsettling, maddening, and ultimately a mark of brillaince...

Of course these hard, odd, daring poem-stories make people mad. They're about real things and real people, not just the poet thinking deep-thoughts-with-metaphors at her studio window. Ai sympathises with bad characters, has no patience for prettified lyrics or faux deep-thinking, talks fast and colloquially, with intrusions of odd syntax. The imagery is full of startle and reality; the language is harsh, the poet's heart big. This poetry is a whole other world, outside of anything anyone else is doing. If you don't like this stuff you really don't like poetry.

Ai is the first poet who ever meant anything to me, and this book is testament to her greatest strengths. It's a pleasure to watch her early poems develop into the dramatic monologues for which she is known. Ai is savage and compassionate--a great combination in a poet--but don't reduce her poems into a summary of subject matter. Her attention to the line and to real human voices make this a book you'll never want to loan.

No one deserves this prize more than this outstanding collection of poetry by one of America's most original and powerful poets. Ai's work is violent and sometimes not easy to read--she's a prophet and a scribe, speaking truths with the voice of unflinching authority and writing them down without compromise. An absolutely superb gathering of her work.