in the terse manner of Sam Shepard," the poet David Wojahn wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986, "and you have a good idea of what an Ai poem sounds like."Though Ai's work was determinedly not autobiographical, its concern with disenfranchised people was informed, she often said, by her own fractional heritage. Many poems could be read as biting dissertations "On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black, and 1/16 Irish," as the title of a 1978 essay she wrote in Ms. magazine put it. (The proportions are telling, too, for not quite adding up to a complete person.)
The narrators of Ai's poems are male and female, young and old, famous and unsung. Many are profoundly unlikable, some genuinely evil. They do terrible things. In the worlds they inhabit, families are shattered, lovers abandoned, children abused.
from The New York Times: Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62
also The Guardian: Poet Ai dies at 62
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