Cruelty

by Ai

When Cruelty was published in 1973, I read the collection repeatedly, transported by the mystery in the poems and by the politics of gender on almost every page. The way the first poem in the collection, “Twenty-Year Marriage,” opens is a clue to this poet’s “You keep me waiting in a truck / with its one good wheel stuck in a ditch, / while you piss against the south side of a tree. / Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight.” The speaker’s insinuation is calculated. The intentional, invented tension breathes on the page. She has our attention. But Ai knows—like any great actor—that language and pace are also crucial. Sometimes a poem may seem like personalized folklore, a feeling culled from the imagination. The characters hurt each other out of a fear of being hurt, and often they are doubly hurt. Do we believe her characters because they seem to evolve from some uncharted place beyond us but also inside us? They are of the soil, as if they’ve always been here; but they also reside on borders—spiritually, psychologically, existentially, and emotionally—as if only half-initiated into the muscular terror of ordinary lives. All the contradictions of so-called democracy live in her speakers. Most of the characters in Ai’s poetry are distinctly rural, charged in mind and belly with folkloric signification, always one step or one trope from homespun violence and blasphemy. What first deeply touched me in Cruelty is Ai’s images—tinctured by an unknown folklore—seemed to arise from some deep, unsayable place, translated from a pre-language of knowing or dreaming with one’s eyes open, as if something from long ago still beckoned to be put into words Yusef Komunyaka

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century

99 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1973

About the author

Ai Ogawa (born Florence Anthony) was an American poet who who described herself as 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw-Chickasaw, 1/4 Black, 1/16 Irish and as well as Southern Cheyenne and Comanche. She is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, as well as for taking on dark, controversial topics in her work. While her poems often contain sex, violence, and other subjects for which she received criticism, she stated during a 1978 interview that she did not view her use of them as gratuitous. About the poems in her first collection, Cruelty, she said: "I wanted people to see how they treated each other and themselves." In 1999 she won the National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.

Reviews

[simu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Omg. Audibly gasped at some of these poems. Recommended by lit professor. First thoughts:

Pure brilliance. Bold. Coarse. Crude. Cunning. Competent. Harsh. Your favorite nightmare. Poems embody themselves. Poems as a tense, physical act of crime in time and space. This violence is necessary. Important, even. Especially in American poetry. She knows death can kill. But she is PERVERSE. She makes her poems with knives that can slice even cinder blocks in two. She is going to fuck you up no matter what. You just need to be ready.

We need to believe that we're all violent. Filled with rage up to the brim. It can't get away from us. We can't get away from it either. Reminds me of humanity's attraction to violence.

"Cuba, 1962" made me shed a tear: "Juanita, dead in the morning like this / I raise the machete / what I take from the Earth, I give back / and cut off her feet." WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT THE FUCK. THE DOUBLE VIOLENCE. I NEED TO KNOW WHO HURT AI.

I felt this book in my BONES and I’ll be thinking about these poems for a long time...

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think about this book often. My friend Ben Soco lent it to me.

It’s a punishing read

It’s from a time when a poetry book was often expected to be a Book instead of just a collection of poems. Truly feels like a unified, painful book.

There’s a lot of gore and violence and sex of all kinds in this book

I didn’t like the book and then I realized that I was the problem—I was uncomfortable with the reality of humanity’s attraction to cruelty. Then it bled into my writing and worldview

I don’t know if I really recommend it?? but it is really brilliant

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is brave, cut to the bone, no holds barred poetry, seemingly ripped from the sinews and muscles of the poet's body. Graphically sexual, yet lyric. I stand in awe.

[Charle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a ride. Cruelty is the first of six poetry books by Ai, and in my opinion, her most significant. She asserts her reputation as a poet unafraid of exposing the baseness of society, with topics ranging from abuse to murder. I love her style--terse and simple. It's interesting how her language stays consistent even when her narrators are different. I'm impressed at how she is able to marry simple language with provocative topics.

My favorites are "The Hitchhiker" and "Prostitute". Ai said this is a book about love rather than hate. It's hard to digest a lot of the material, but I can see why she says that...

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

DAMN!! FIERCE!! Here's one of the shorter poems in this unforgettable collection:
RECAPTURE

"When you run off, I start after you,
as the sun rolls overhead
and rocks in the sky's blue hands.

As always, I find you, beat you.
The corner of your mouth bleeds
and your tongue slips out, slips in.
You don't fight me, you never do.

Going back, you stumble against me
and I grab your wrist, pulling you down.
Come on, bitch of my love, while it is still easy."

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not realize the title was telling me exactly what the content was: dramatic monologues cataloguing humans' cruelty through poems carrying motifs across the work. Some of the poems, say "Child Beater" and "Hitchhiker," haunt me still. I am going to read the whole trilogy of poetry this collection starts. I am incredibly curious as to where Ai will take me.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stark, unsparing, and unsympathetic poetry unlike much of anything I’ve read. Everything is done in character, as a series of monologues from shifting, sometimes disorienting perspectives. Often violent, intensely sexual, and just plain strange, these are hardscrabble poems, focused on all manner of rural characters and hard-up souls. Bleak and visceral, works for me.

[Skye Tarshis · Rating 5 out of 5]

To me this is a holy text

[Aster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cottagecore horror. You don't feel the full horror in your chest or stomach. You feel your muscles twitching. A jerk in your throat. A flick on your eye when you're about to sleep.

[Lydia Freier]

how many times have i read this poem book and each time i leave with something new. this is cowboy poetry, she is a wilderness. shadow self and the musk of life, pheromones, wildfire.

[chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thing I want most is hard,
running toward my own teeth
and it bites back.
-- "Cruelty"

[Raffy Rillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry at its most evocative and ferocious. She writes words with a sharp knife.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I learned from this book is that I LOVE poems about farming,, like a good poem about the cows in the pasture is everything to me. That was the unexpected joy of this book! Perhaps it can be divined from the title, but it's pretty intense. The gruesome, the erotic, the pastoral meet here. And the poems are so electric and unexpected! Ai writes from many different speakers to craft a bloody and aching text. 4 stars because at times the gore seemed to veer into a place that made me wonder if some of the poems just reproduced the violences they described.

::

CW: abortion, IPV/DV

[Zi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Ai's Cruelty much more than Killing Floor. Cruelty had a pretty clear narrative arc, subject matter, and concept. While it was a little confusing at times when the narrator would shift from poem to poem (mainly, I sometimes didn't know whether the speaker was a man or a woman until halfway through), the collection was honestly stunning over all. Interestingly, I saw similarities regarding writing style, tone, and themes between Cruelty and Warsan Shire's chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth; I wonder if Ai was an inspiration for Shire when she was writing her collection. Here, I enjoyed the poems both individually and as a whole, unlike in Killing Floor.

The main themes of the collection include gender, sex and sexuality, desire, violence, death, and, above all, cruelty. Some of my favorite poems include:

1. Cruelty
2. Young Farm Woman Alone
3. Recapture
4. Woman to Man
5. Forty-Three-Year-Old Woman, Masturbating

[Kevin]

One of my favorite poems is in here: Anniversary. With some more study I'm sure some others in here would become new favorites. Ai writes my kind of poetry - sort of like Sharon Olds, in that the narrative is easy to follow and she's mostly concerned with familial relationships and trauma. There are some amazing lines and disturbing/heartwarming images of sexuality, and there's a lot of weight on the slash separating those two adjectives.

[Elizabeth Godfrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely one of the better collections of Ai's poetry. This is her first publication, and possibly my favorite. Though out of print now, in the UK at least, and definitely difficult to find, reading it at The British Library made it, perhaps, all the better.

[April · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far, the best poet EVER.

[Danny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to read at times."There's a pot of air on the stove."

[SmarterLilac · Rating 5 out of 5]

They broke the mold when they made this incredible poet. I have never encountered any poetry as raw, truthful, frightening or thrilling as that in Ai's first book.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense poems - not for the faint of heart.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fierce, dark, imaginative, frightening, kinetic poems. The poet is not afraid of intensity. I read this in an edition that included Ai's book, "Killing Floor."

[Mills College Library]

811.54 A288c 1973

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

What! Did she just say that? Should she have said that? ....yeah! hell yeah she should say that, she's saying it because it needed to be said. Said for those too scared, ashamed or unable to.