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,

           I've never once felt anything
           that might get close. Can't you see?
           The thing I want most is hard,
           running toward my own teeth
           and it bites back.

Ai's whole attempt in Cruelty was to open her eyes wide and to see the essentials strongly, clearly, and honestly. The essentials, for Ai, are that we are born and die, and that we love and hate and struggle with each other on a lighted path between those two doors to darkness. This is a theme often obscured by complication, a theme most of us are hard-pressed...