The Collected Poems of Ai is a formidable collection of searing blues-inflected rants and incendiary monologues--as much strident performance art as well-shaped poetry. It is both achingly real and suffused with dreamscapes and hallucinatory trawls through imagined afterlives.
Ai Ogawa's collected verse pays homage to desperate and disparate American lives, from the famous to the anonymous flame-outs, junkies and whores who never came close to the American dream. Her famous subjects include George Custer, the Kennedy brothers, J. Edgar Hoover and Jimmy Hoffa, all of whose grim after-death travels she imagines through surrealistic imagery dripping with the sheen of past sins and instant karma. Her vivid characterizations always seem apt and alive, spot on yet compassionate to a fault. She also writes about the down-and-outs and disenfranchised with equal vigor and clarity, line after line displaying fierce witness to lives lived at the edge of economic ruin or emotional devastation.
Ai (born Florence Anthony) wrote passionately about racial relations and sexual politics from the standpoint of an outsider, simultaneously comfortable in her own skin and secure in the well-earned wisdom of her worldview. She never relied on the most obvious "poetic" line, but her poetry achieves through repetition, keen insight and courage a power that puts mere technicians to shame.
This collection is a must read for lovers of blues-based poetry and the lucid wailing at the heart of all great protest art. When Ai died in March 2010, the world of poetry lost a fine, fierce voice. --Donald Powell, freelance writer