Status
Available
Genres
Publication
New York : W.W. Norton, c2003.
Description
In poems that travel from the horrific flight of a World War II pilot to the World Trade Center attack, from the death of JFK Jr. to the poet's own bastard birth, Ai conjures purity as a distant memory and the knowledge of evil as an "infinite dark night." "An undoubtedly powerful personae."--Publishers Weekly "Ai's cleansing soliloquies give voice to pain both personal and communal....[Dread] presents her most masterfully unnerving works to date."--Booklist "Dread has the characteristic moral strength that makes Ai a necessary poet."--The New York Times Book Review
User reviews
LibraryThing member kidzdoc
Ai (1947-2010) was an award-winning poet and professor at Oklahoma State University until her death from cancer last month (an obituary of her appeared in The New York Times on March 28th). She was originally named Florence Anthony, and was born out of wedlock to an African-American woman and a
Her collection Vice: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for poetry in 1999, and her 1986 book Sin: Poems won an American Book Award in 1986. A posthumous volume of her work, No Surrender, will be published in the US in September.
Dread is a collection of poems mainly about adults who relive traumatic events from their childhood, including abuse, the death of a sibling or parent, or, in one poem, Ai's own birth, which caused great shame to her mother and extended family. The poems are moderately lengthy, simple and searingly direct. The story that affected me the most was "Delusion", in which a disturbed young woman goes to the World Trade Center just after 9/11 to look for her sister, who actually died years before. The sister tells the woman that she will find her at Ground Zero, after she suffers a mental breakdown. Here is a short excerpt:
In the hospital, I chanced to see
the horrible events of September 11th on TV.
The day of my release, I told a nurse,
"I'm well, you know,"
and she didn't even glance my way,
as she replied, "That's what they all say."
On the way to my apartment,
my sister came out of hiding.
"You'll find me at ground zero," she whispered
and I answered, "I know."
"I had a conversation with the dead.
It was all in my head," I said aloud.
No one paid any notice.
I was just another person "with issues"
and on that day in particular
attention was focused elsewhere.
So when I showed up at the lodging
for relatives of survivors,
I had an identity at last
that combined the past with the present.
The poems in Dread are deeply moving and often disturbing, and give voices to stories that are frequently hidden. I will certainly look for more of Ai's books in the near future.
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Japanese man. She legally changed her name to Ai, which means "love" in Japanese: "Ai is the only name by which I wish, and indeed, should be known. Since I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop, and I was forced to live a lie for so many years, while my mother concealed my natural father's identity from me, I feel that I should not have to be identified with a man, who was only my stepfather, for all eternity."Her collection Vice: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for poetry in 1999, and her 1986 book Sin: Poems won an American Book Award in 1986. A posthumous volume of her work, No Surrender, will be published in the US in September.
Dread is a collection of poems mainly about adults who relive traumatic events from their childhood, including abuse, the death of a sibling or parent, or, in one poem, Ai's own birth, which caused great shame to her mother and extended family. The poems are moderately lengthy, simple and searingly direct. The story that affected me the most was "Delusion", in which a disturbed young woman goes to the World Trade Center just after 9/11 to look for her sister, who actually died years before. The sister tells the woman that she will find her at Ground Zero, after she suffers a mental breakdown. Here is a short excerpt:
In the hospital, I chanced to see
the horrible events of September 11th on TV.
The day of my release, I told a nurse,
"I'm well, you know,"
and she didn't even glance my way,
as she replied, "That's what they all say."
On the way to my apartment,
my sister came out of hiding.
"You'll find me at ground zero," she whispered
and I answered, "I know."
"I had a conversation with the dead.
It was all in my head," I said aloud.
No one paid any notice.
I was just another person "with issues"
and on that day in particular
attention was focused elsewhere.
So when I showed up at the lodging
for relatives of survivors,
I had an identity at last
that combined the past with the present.
The poems in Dread are deeply moving and often disturbing, and give voices to stories that are frequently hidden. I will certainly look for more of Ai's books in the near future.
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