one step further in her attempt to encompass all humanity. The book makes strong political and religious statements in addition to the sorts of statements the poet had previously been making about human nature in general. Many of the figures here are well known; as usual, though, they are seen from a new perspective.

“Two Brothers,” the poem that opens the book, is told from the points of view of American politicians John and Robert Kennedy. The poem is about death, not surprisingly, but it is also about immortality. These two personages are already dead, after all, and they are not speaking as if they were alive. Indeed, they discuss their deaths. Yet the poem ends with a suggestion that death is not final: “Give ’em a miracle. Give ’em Hollywood. Give ’em Saint Jack.” There is a suggestion that, ultimately, God is responsible for all that has occurred, that the human players involved are secondary.

“The Prisoner” takes a similar tone. This poem is told from the point of view of an anonymous prisoner who is regularly tortured; his jailer refers to himself as “Our Father.” “The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Fiction” is an imagined confession by the man generally considered the “father of the atomic bomb” after he has seen the bomb’s effects. He is horrified at what has happened, horrified that people now have a godlike control over the very fabric of the universe.

Perhaps Ai’s poetic point of view is best summed up in her note to Fate: “Fate is about eroticism, politics, religion, and show business as tragicomedy, performed by men and women banished to the bare stage of their obsessions.” This can be said to be true of all of her works. Ai’s poems are indeed about people laid bare, and her poetic style attests this. There is no embellishment, no flowery speech, no use of complex metaphors. She is simply telling people about the deepest and darkest parts of themselves.

In Greed, poems about events and figures in popular culture show the consequences of selfishness not only for the individuals who commit acts of greed but also for their victims, whether they are members of a community that has been imploded by riots (“Riot Act, April 29, 1992”), citizens of a country that has been deprived of a leader who gives them hope in a time of turmoil (“Jack Ruby on Ice”), or economically deprived as a result of the greed of others (“Miracle in Manila,” a meditation on the dysfunctional marriage and political regime of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos).

The collection of poems in previous books and new poems in Vice shows the trajectory of Ai’s career. Her unswerving commitment to exposing corruption in politics and private lives gives new meaning to the statement that the political is personal. The title of Ai’s 2003 book of poems, Dread, signals the hesitation to confront the most difficult experiences but courage and determination to meet them head-on nevertheless, as she does in “Delusion,” written from the standpoint of a woman whose sister was killed in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. In “Greetings Friend” Ai describes her experience growing up as a child of mixed race and feeling marginalized, or “with a slight sense of dislocation.” In stating, “I guess that means I’m not real either,” Ai makes those feelings of not fitting in real.

Ai has changed the face of American poetry by her forthright, often horrific renderings of some of the grimmer aspects of reality. She has been extolled as a great poet and reviled as a writer of pornography. Ai can identify with so many types of people because she has such a strange and varied history herself and has never really identified with any one ethnic or racial group. She can deal with pain and anger so well because she has been hurt and she is angry.

“The Kid”

First published: 1976 (collected in Vice, 1999)

Type of work: Poem

A young boy describes his murderous acts and his state of mind.

“The Kid” is perhaps the most disturbing of Ai’s poems. Told in the first-person voice, this is the story of a boy of fourteen who is far from ordinary. The poem begins in a fairly straightforward way. The boy clearly lives on a farm; he is busy whacking the tires on the family’s truck with an iron rod. His father calls to him “to help hitch the team,” and then his mother calls him. He tosses a rock at the kitchen window, but he is unsuccessful in making his point in such a tame manner.

In the second stanza, this boy has given up whacking tires, and he splits his father’s skull open with the iron rod; when his mother comes running, he bludgeons her as well. He then proceeds to abandon the rod for a gun and starts shooting, first killing horses and then his little sister. The short poem is, however, more than a mere picture of bloody violence. It is the boy’s attitude that gives this poem its power: “Yeah. I’m Jack, Hogarth’s son./ I’m nimble, I’m quick.// I’m fourteen. I’m a wind from nowhere./ I can break your heart.”

There is no attempt by some outsider to justify the boy’s acts. The reader is not told about overly stern parents, about a “disturbed” child, or any such situation. Yet, obviously, something is wrong.

After the boy has killed his family, he puts on his father’s best clothes, packs his sister’s doll and his mother’s nightgown in a suitcase, and heads for the highway. It is as if, by taking his family’s belongings and symbolically identifying with his father, he has somehow justified his actions.

The most terrifying aspect of the poem is that the reader is compelled to identify with the boy and, in some strange way, to feel sorry for him. Modern culture tends to assume that a boy of fourteen who murders has somehow been mistreated by society. The point is that even a child can be a monster, and perhaps the way in which children are viewed is a large part of the problem. As the poem opens, there is a tendency to picture a cute, innocent-looking boy who is merely being hassled by his parents and annoyed by his sister while he is trying to play. The fact that this play turns to grisly murder hardly changes that opinion. Readers can hardly excuse the boy’s acts, but they wish they could, somehow.

“The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981”

First published: 1986 (collected in Vice, 1999)

Type of work: Poem

“The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981” is a dramatic monologue by a mass murderer of children.

“The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981” was inspired by the case of Wayne Williams, who made headlines by committing a series of murders of black children in and around Atlanta from 1979 to 1981. The poem begins with a graphic description of the murderer pushing a child’s body over an embankment. He identifies with the boy and imagines himself within the dead body: “I watch it roll/ and feel I’m rolling with it.” He speaks of “the little lamb/ I killed tonight,” and then he goes and has some hot cocoa. The murderer then describes washing out the blood that stains his bathroom. He cleans and cleans, then finishes his hot chocolate.

Once again, the reader can understand how this man is thinking. He is clearly pleased by his actions: He is “a good shepherd,” seducing little boys to their deaths. Yet there is more involved here; the killer opens a book on mythology and remarks,

Saturn, it says, devours his children.Yes, it’s true, I know it.An ordinary man, though, a man like meeats and is full.Only God is never satisfied.

This is a rather strange religious statement. Saturn, a god of Roman mythology, killed and ate all of his children except for Jupiter, who escaped and later killed his father, thus becoming king of the gods. It is clear that the murderer is identifying himself with divinity. As a god, he has the right to dispose of his subjects and feels no particular guilt in doing so. The poet’s basic idea is that, ultimately, God is responsible for everything and that humans are merely pawns in a great game. These sometimes destroy other pawns, but it really does not matter, because God is never quite satisfied.

Sin is full of such ideas, but this is an unusually powerful presentation. It is difficult to feel sympathy for a mass murderer, but it is also difficult not to see his way of looking at the situation. Even a man who kills young children has a point of view worth considering. Lastly, there is a sense of satisfaction once the children are murdered and the mess is cleaned up: “Only God is never satisfied,” the killer says. Does this mean that the murderer is somehow more merciful, or more just, than God? This is a question left open by the poem.

“The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer”

First published: 1986 (collected in Vice, 1999)

Type of work: Poem

Written from the perspective of J. Robert Oppenheimer, this poem describes the scientific process that led to his development of the atomic bomb.

“The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” subtitled “A Fiction,” presents the story of a theoretical physicist who, in the early 1940’s with the threat of Japanese attack looming, was selected to head a team of scientists to work on atom bomb development, despite his contributions to left-wing organizations. Written in Oppenheimer’s voice, the poem describes the evolution of his passion for science as well as his justifications for the role that he played in developing the uranium bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and the plutonium bomb that decimated Nagasaki.

The speaker describes his shedding of consciousness at Los Alamos, where the bombs were created, as attaining “enlightenment,” where he “threw off the night like an old skin,” and his eyes “filled with light.” The moment that he “fell to the ground” is presented as a spiritual experience. He compares himself to the bomb, describing how “some say” that when he hit, “there was an explosion.” In this identification with the bomb, Oppenheimer shows how much of his life had been consumed by this project, almost as if he had become one with the bomb. However, he also describes how “there was only silence” rocking him “in its cradle of cumulus cloud,” creating a false image of peacefulness after the destruction.

To further justify his participation in this event, the persona of Oppenheimer suggests, “It is better to leap into the void./ Isn’t that what we all want anyway?—” When “we accept the worst in ourselves,” he proposes, we are “set free,” as if to absolve himself of involvement in the project.

The scientist then relates the origin of his passion for science, describing a “ferocious need to know,” as signified by the hypothesis “what if” that all scientists are trained to ask. He asks if readers, addressed as “gentlemen,” have that insatiable curiosity, too—the desire to be “born again and again/ from that dark, metal womb.”

Still, even science is not absolute, the speaker argues, comparing it to a “bed we make and unmake at whim.” “The truth is always changing,” he states, “always shaped by the latest/ collective urge to destroy.” Despite these rationalizations, he is “gnawed down by the teeth” of his nightmares, a guilty conscience that “will not heal.” He takes a cynical approach to nationalistic pride, as typified by “our military in readiness,/ our private citizens/ in a constant frenzy of patriotism/ and jingoistic pride.” “Good soldiers,” he says, “we do not regret or mourn,/ but pick up the guns of our fallen.” In the process, the scientist states, we destroy ourselves “atom by atom,” leading to our ironic “transcendent annihilation.”

“The Priest’s Confession”

First published: 1986 (collected in Vice, 1999)

Type of work: Poem

A priest describes the guilt he feels for sexual involvement with a young girl.

In “The Priest’s Confession,” Ai presents the thought process of a priest who believes he has sinned and battles his own temptations, fearing the wrath of God. He confesses, “I didn’t say mass this morning” and then goes on to describe “Rosamund, the orphan,” who tempts him with her laughter and “the almond scent of her body” that wraps around his neck “like a noose.” This image of a noose is repeated in part 3 of the poem, where he contemplates hanging a rope from the rafter of the church and kicking away “the needlepoint footstool” so that he can “swing out over the churchyard.”

Images of Rosamund and her developing body haunt him. Despite his attempts at self-control, he gives in to temptation, breaks his rosary, and then rolls “on the floor/ in a kind of ecstasy” for his transgression. He describes to God how he craves parts of Rosamund’s body, such as the “bird’s nest of hair/ barely covered by her drawers” and her breasts that “grew in secret/ like two evil thoughts,” but he still wants to know that God loves him.

The priest confesses that, in a moment of sadistic violence, he pressed his face between Rosamund’s legs and “bit down” so hard that his mouth bled, but that he did not stop. Although the priest describes Rosamund as “so quiet” and then suddenly crying out, the reader is doubtful that she “moved closer and closer” to the priest’s lips, as he describes. Since Rosamund is not given a voice or a choice in this poem, perhaps the priest is having delusions of transcendence. After this encounter, he is haunted by both her laughter and her screams, and he resigns himself to being a sinner, entreating, “Lord, come walk with me” because he knows it is his only hope for redemption.

“Eve’s Story”

First published: 1990 (collected in Fate, 1991)

Type of work: Poem

A sixteen-year-old girl recounts her experiences with a fraudulent evangelist.

“Eve’s Story” is a clear statement about established religion and its most evangelistic proponents. The poem is told from the viewpoint of a sixteen-year-old girl who leaves home after her father strangles a deformed kitten; she winds up in an evangelist’s tent.

The girl is quickly seduced by the evangelist. She becomes his servant, even helping him to procure prostitutes. When he becomes increasingly successful, the girl is edged out of his inner circle by more photogenic women: “We had gone video,/ but I wasn’t in them./ I did not fit his image anymore./ Cheryl did, with her blue contacts, blonde hair,/ and silicone implants.” The girl avenges herself by filming the evangelist engaged in a lurid sex act and exposing him as a hypocrite. His followers desert him, and blond, blue-eyed Cheryl becomes a talk-show celebrity. Yet the speaker stays with the fallen preacher, explaining, “So now we live like any other/ retired couple in Sarasota.”

Ai is commenting not merely upon the preacher himself but also upon the religious system that has produced him and people like him: “Of a sudden, I realize/ this is how Eve must have done it./ The snake and God were only props/ she discarded when she left Adam/ writhing on the ground.” Unlike most of Ai’s narrators, this girl inspires real compassion and real pity. She is clearly a victim of other people’s actions. The actual blame is still hard to place. Is it the preacher himself who is to blame? Is it the religion he espouses? Or, in the final analysis, is it God who is to blame? If sex is original sin, and also one of the most pleasant actions a human being can experience, does this mean that it is sinful to have fun?

As always in Ai’s work, the reader is not told very much about the girl in question, whether, for example, she is black or white, Christian, another religion, or atheist. She is simply presented as having been victimized by a religious system and a man who embodies it. The reader is also confused about how much blame to lay on the evangelist; perhaps he, too, should be considered a victim.

“Sleeping Beauty: A Fiction”

First published: 1999 (collected in Vice, 1999)

Type of work: Poem

A comatose patient describes being raped by a hospital aide.

From the beginning of “Sleeping Beauty: A Fiction,” dedicated to an actual comatose patient raped by an aide, it is clear that a violation has occurred when the speaker addresses the aide who raped her, saying, “You steal into my room/ between darkness and noon/ to doff the disguise as nurse’s aide.” She describes him as “furtive” and his violation as violent, as he spreads her legs apart and breaks through “the red door” to her “chamber.”

The speaker reminds the rapist of how he wipes away the evidence of how he mingled his life with “what is left” of hers, despite the evidence that is still inside her. This leads to thoughts of how any baby that would grow inside her would only know her “as its host” and never as Mother, nor the rapist as Father. The speaker then remembers the image of her mother praying to Saint Jude for a miracle so that her daughter would no longer be in a coma. Yet the speaker is still someone “for whom language is silence,/ language is thirst/ that is not slaked.” Despite this powerlessness, the victim asserts to the rapist, “My eyes were open,/ while you violated me” and “ I could see/ beyond the veil of your deceit.”

The poem ends with the speaker recalling the image of Sleeping Beauty and how, instead of being woken with a kiss, she is “pricked” with the “thorn of violence.” She realizes that there is no happy ending for her story, that unlike the fairy tale that her mother once read to her, it will not end with “forever” but eternity.