In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

Vice by Ai is one of those books I purchased after browsing a local bookstore, not really expecting to buy anything but always on the lookout for something new and different. As it turns out, this is quite different from the poetry I usually discuss here. Ai is a much harder-edged version of Tracy Chapman, [...]

I’m not sure I’d agree with Ai that the poems in vice are about “transcendence — that’s what I’m striving for in all these poems; no matter what the characters go through, no matter what their end, they mean to live.” At least not my definition of “transcendence.” What they do exemplify beautifully is empathy, [...]

The sixty some pages of “New Poems” that ends vice are very similar to those that make up the first two hundred pages of the book, though the poem on President Clinton’s affair obviously couldn’t have been written in the past. Unfortunately, for me, at least, the shock-effect of earlier poems doesn’t wear too well. [...]