[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 in part as it is hard to enjoy on the whole. At her best Ai writes a highly disciplined, cleanly organized, fastidiously punctuated free verse that somewhat chastens her subject matter. Her characteristic mode is the short dramatic monologue, and her personae are diverse and sometimes intriguingly complex. Trotsky, Marilyn Monroe, a Nazi homosexual, a Choctaw woman living in the nineteenth century, one...