I finished Cruelty/Killing Floor by Ai (that is her name, not Artificial Intelligence).
I have read poems of hers over the years in various anthologies. The first poem I read by her was “The Country Midwife: a Day” One of the first poems in Cruelty. It was assigned in the first creative writing class I took at UT with Kirk Heinzelman back in the fall of 1980. That poem, like all of the poems I have ever read by her, was a dramatic monolog. The speakers range from a midwife watching her patient bleed out, to a mortician’s 12 year old son about to act out a fantasy on the corpse of a prostitute. All of the poems have strong imagery, dazzling imagery…disturbing imagery. Ai does not spend a lot of time on nature, but instead she focuses on the darker side of the human condition. Ai is a stunning poet.
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