No Surrender

Ai (1947–2010) established her reputation, with seven books in 35 years, by giving voice, through dramatic monologs, to the famous and infamous, the marginalized and alienated. With this posthumous collection, she ventures closer to home; one cannot help but sense similarities to her own biography among the occasionally outlandish embellishments. The people who speak these poems are odd, curious, and yet so strikingly familiar, so right. A disillusioned nun moves to America from Ireland, meets Elvis, and rediscovers her faith; a pregnant young woman searches her desert home for the rattlesnake that haunts her; a woman confronts her mother's self-destructive addiction. A double amputee named Ulysses goes on a remarkable journey through a hurricane, while a New York taxi driver tells us: "I was smuggled to America/ inside a ship's container." These are the words of common people, with unique American lives, American dreams, and, sadly, American nightmares. "I am part Southern/ Cheyenne as well as black, Irish, German and half/ Japanese," a speaker (reminiscent of Ai herself) recounts her ancestry, "which doesn't please him."