Since the appearance of her first collection, Cruelty (1973), Ai has become a major force in contemporary poetry, pushing her chosen poetic form, the dramatic monologue, to courageous new limits. Her poetry is refreshingly simple in style, yet...

Carmelo Anthony had 24 points and Allen Iverson added 23 and the Denver Nuggets won their fifth straight game with a 115-83 win over the New York Knicks on Saturday night.Marcus Camby grabbed 20 rebounds and had six assists against his former team.Zach Randolph rejoined...

Allen Iverson has gone from almost invincible to nearly invisible.In six trips to the playoffs with the Philadelphia 76ers, Iverson's 30.6 scoring average was second all-time to Michael Jordan's 33.4.He scored in 31 in his Nuggets playoff debut, but he's gone in a deep funk...

Today is the Prospect Park Alliance Hat Party. As far as we can figure (and we’re sort of scared to dig too much), this shebang takes place in the wee hours of the morning at the grand River Café in Brooklyn, where ladies (and some...

There is a poetry of sweetness and light, a poetry that cloaks the viscera and makes of them a human form divine. And then there is the poetry of Ai. In Killing Floor, her long-awaited second book of poetry, Ai fulfills the considerable promise of her first collection, Cruelty …, where she had written,

[The poems in Killing Floor] are obsessed with the human capacity for violence. Deaths by axing, shooting, bludgeoning, strangulation, and hara-kiri occur in piece after piece. When the situation lacks overt violence, Ai's metaphors leap into the breach…. Touches of perversion here and there heighten the air of Grand Guignol. A little of the lurid goes a long way, and even though Ai's volume is less than fifty pages few will wish it longer than it is. Yet this book is as easy to respect...

From Russia, Mexico, Buchenwald and Minnesota, the voices [in Killing Floor] speak of patricide, necrophilia, self-immolation, cannibalism and torture, converging in the single voice of an old soul, androgynous and driving, a ghost ranging space and time, drawn to moments in which the oppressed one is moved to act. Ai is concerned with that single moment, revelatory and disassociated, which is the hinge of human history, facilitating radical change, allowing the heart to open to a new order. She discovers t...