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Sin
These collected poems, all centered around the uses and abuses of power, form a series of historical narratives drawn from the actual and imaginary past
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
2 people are currently reading
134 people want to read
About the author
Ai
5,238 books92 followersAi 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.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 20, 2012
With rare exceptions, the best poetry should never be trivial. It should shred...eviscerate...flense...rend. Poetry should enlighten the dark corners of hard truths. It should buoy the spirit by cheerleading our potential and regaling us with memories of our highest aspirations.
Poetry should make us ache...either with longing through its visions of hyper real beauty or with revulsion through its unblinking, unwavering gaze at motes within our collective eyes.
Poetry should speak of essences and universal patterns...love, hate, passion, indifference, rapture, agony, acceptance, loneliness, life, death.
Poetry should depict the possible and the loss of what might have been and tap into the ether that binds all of us together.
Sin by Ai is the BEST kind of poetry.
It is hard to describe in summary fashion what these 20 pieces are about because they are elusive and dreamlike. The closest I can come is that they are glimpses of individual human souls and how those souls both change, and are changed by, the collective body of the American experience.
THE POEMS:
There were some poems that did not penetrate me and by which I did not feel particularly evoked. This is probably more due to my denseness than any failing of the poetess. However I believe that one should judge poetry on how it affect them and not on the basis of objective merits or perceived greatness. Poetry should be personal. Thus, there are some pieces that didn’t speak to me and I would call them worthy misses.
Oh, but there were also eye-opening life-changers that dismantled me and left me in awe of Ai’s skillful perception.
"The Prisoner" is a dark depiction of perverted patriotism and the dangerous yet growing belief that “freedom is something you earn.” This one really floored me. From the opening line:
"Yesterday, the man who calls himself ‘Our Father’
made me crawl on smashed Coke bottles..."
to the Orwellian like conversion to the cause of this young Winston-like girl.
"The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981" effectively conveys the brutal, detached psychology of John Wayne Gacy as we hear, in his own words, his complete lack of empathy for the murders he perpetrates. This poem was also in Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem which I previously reviewed.
"The Mother’s Tale" is haunting and shockingly ties ethnicity, religion and tradition into the endless cycle of spousal abuse against women. Powerful, deeply disturbing...and incredibly skilled verse.
St. Anne’s Reel, 1870 was a two page glimpse into the pain and anguish of a one-sided love. I really hated the narrator in this one and yet could so understand the words and the feelings. This is part of the “poetry should hurt” camp.
"Kristallnacht" is a series of emotional snapshots of the experiences of a young German Jew during World War II and Holocaust. It also contains the most powerful line of verse of the entire collection:
"Pretend I died for nothing,
instead of living for it."
I have not been able to get that out of my head since I read it. It is so saturated with pain and loss and disillusionment for all of humanity. I will be some time recovering from that simple collection of 10 words.
THOUGHTS:
This is praise-worthy collection of powerful verse and this compliment is coming from someone who is not really of poetry person. I am becoming more and more appreciative of it as I get older and I plan on continuing to explore different varieties of it, but I certainly do not consider this a favorite format.
I still loved it and I think this can be appreciated by anyone who enjoys emotional writing and imagery that is designed to speak to your heart as much as your mind.
This collection deserves a much wider audience.
4.0 stars. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
August 28, 2019
After reading this collection, it would be impossible for me not to seek out every work Ai has written. The emotions, the candor, the flawless execution of prose poetry—I am astounded. If pain is beauty, Ai's poetry is a blinding work of art.
This collection has truly taken my breath for ransom, and "Sin" could easily be my favorite collection of poetry I ever read. An easy five stars.
This collection has truly taken my breath for ransom, and "Sin" could easily be my favorite collection of poetry I ever read. An easy five stars.
February 5, 2019
The subtitle for Ai’s musical and imaginative Sin might as well be, after Hannah Arendt, not “the banality of evil,” but “the eloquence of evil.” In Sin, crooks, ghosts and pedophiles croon and coax us into identifying with them, not just with their excuses, but with their lived experience: “I stood in the bell tower / and watched Rosamund, the orphan, / chase butterflies, her laughter / rising, slamming into me, / while the almond scent of her body / wrapped around my neck like a noose” (39, “The Priest’s Confession”). If sin is about “missing the mark,” Ai’s work reminds us that goodness is also tricky: it weaves itself into evil too, showing itself as tenderness, love, vocation – as her imagined child murderer writes in “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981”: “And don’t I lead them / like a good shepherd?” (28)
At first glance, Ai’s works come off as character studies – animations of historical figures like JFK (“Two Brothers”) or Oppenheimer (“The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer”). But to see them as merely character studies is to miss the deliberate elements of fiction within them that make them strange and unforgettable – as in “Two Brothers”: “You lift out my brain. / When you bite down, I burn. / The air smells like creosote … I put my arms around you / and you disappear into me” (4). What’s more, in Ai’s work – sometimes self-consciously labelled ‘A Fiction’ – the poetic form allows her to play with enjambment’s ability to surprise and enliven lines that would otherwise seem improbable; the characters come to life in the theatre of line-breaks. And the form of the poem allows her something prose would not, through lending her short pieces an air of dignity and finesse. If these are characters, after all, they only live through their elocutions. The plot must be said to be played out. And the way the plot is said is half their delight: “Death, Bobby, hit me / like the flat of a hand” (1).
The only place where Ai’s work falls short is in those few poems in which the poet’s choices emerge too saliently from beneath their character, for example: “for that one moment, / I’m the unencumbered bird of my imagination … each note a black flower … mercifully opening / into the unforgiving new day” (26, “The Man With the Saxophone”). Compare that rather inelegant declaration with a few lines earlier in the same poem, in which the character speaks: “I’ve had it all and lost it / and I never want it back, / only give me this morning to keep…” – in which the saxophonist’s experience of the “unforgiving new day” is already quite evident. (That being said, if a poet’s principal failing is being overshadowed by her own characters, I’d say that’s a rather good problem to have.)
In the final assessment, it seems that Ai is interested in unknowable psychologies, be them the psychologies of the dead or the deviant. To support her in this task, she seems to have chosen two principal instruments: metaphor and empathy. The first is the source of her poetic strangeness: “How does I feel to be dead? I say … And when you open your mouth, / a ball of yellow light falls to the floor / and burns a hole through it” (17, “Conversation”). The second tool, empathy, is the entire collection’s lifeblood. Consider how Ai’s priest character opens his poem with a moment of vulnerability, of confession to the reader: “I didn’t say mass this morning” (39). It is this line that allows us to keep reading, that charms us before we are chilled by what we hear; the lines ring with musicality and life, the characters attempt to entertain, or at least mollify us. The priest only confesses he didn’t say mass because he knows it was the wrong thing to do – he understands he isn’t perfect – but who is? And in this way, we are made complicit by our own comprehension.
In Sin, Ai is interested not in vindication or salvation, but rather complexification – as her imaginary priest writes of his journey towards God: “a journey not home, / not back to the source of things, / but away from it, / towards a harsh, purifying light / that keeps nothing whole.”
At first glance, Ai’s works come off as character studies – animations of historical figures like JFK (“Two Brothers”) or Oppenheimer (“The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer”). But to see them as merely character studies is to miss the deliberate elements of fiction within them that make them strange and unforgettable – as in “Two Brothers”: “You lift out my brain. / When you bite down, I burn. / The air smells like creosote … I put my arms around you / and you disappear into me” (4). What’s more, in Ai’s work – sometimes self-consciously labelled ‘A Fiction’ – the poetic form allows her to play with enjambment’s ability to surprise and enliven lines that would otherwise seem improbable; the characters come to life in the theatre of line-breaks. And the form of the poem allows her something prose would not, through lending her short pieces an air of dignity and finesse. If these are characters, after all, they only live through their elocutions. The plot must be said to be played out. And the way the plot is said is half their delight: “Death, Bobby, hit me / like the flat of a hand” (1).
The only place where Ai’s work falls short is in those few poems in which the poet’s choices emerge too saliently from beneath their character, for example: “for that one moment, / I’m the unencumbered bird of my imagination … each note a black flower … mercifully opening / into the unforgiving new day” (26, “The Man With the Saxophone”). Compare that rather inelegant declaration with a few lines earlier in the same poem, in which the character speaks: “I’ve had it all and lost it / and I never want it back, / only give me this morning to keep…” – in which the saxophonist’s experience of the “unforgiving new day” is already quite evident. (That being said, if a poet’s principal failing is being overshadowed by her own characters, I’d say that’s a rather good problem to have.)
In the final assessment, it seems that Ai is interested in unknowable psychologies, be them the psychologies of the dead or the deviant. To support her in this task, she seems to have chosen two principal instruments: metaphor and empathy. The first is the source of her poetic strangeness: “How does I feel to be dead? I say … And when you open your mouth, / a ball of yellow light falls to the floor / and burns a hole through it” (17, “Conversation”). The second tool, empathy, is the entire collection’s lifeblood. Consider how Ai’s priest character opens his poem with a moment of vulnerability, of confession to the reader: “I didn’t say mass this morning” (39). It is this line that allows us to keep reading, that charms us before we are chilled by what we hear; the lines ring with musicality and life, the characters attempt to entertain, or at least mollify us. The priest only confesses he didn’t say mass because he knows it was the wrong thing to do – he understands he isn’t perfect – but who is? And in this way, we are made complicit by our own comprehension.
In Sin, Ai is interested not in vindication or salvation, but rather complexification – as her imaginary priest writes of his journey towards God: “a journey not home, / not back to the source of things, / but away from it, / towards a harsh, purifying light / that keeps nothing whole.”
August 18, 2025
I'm an American.
I shall not want.
There's nothing that doesn't belong to me.
-- "Blue Suede Shoes"
Hell is only as far as your next breath
and heaven unimaginably distant.
Gate after gate stands between you and God,
so why not meet the devil instead?
He at least has time for people.
-- 'The Priest's Confession"
Like characters in the funny papers,
under the heading
"Further Adventures of the Lost Tribe,"
we march past the third eye of History,
as it rocks back and forth
in its hammock of stars.
We strip away the tattered fabric
of the universe
to the juicy, dark meat,
the nothing beyond time.
We tear ourselves down atom by atom,
till electron and positron,
we become our own transcendent annihilation.
-- "The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer"
People go on with their lives
on this day that is one hundred years long,
on this sad red balloon of a planet,
the air escaping from it
like the hot, sour breath of a child.
-- "The Detective"
I shall not want.
There's nothing that doesn't belong to me.
-- "Blue Suede Shoes"
Hell is only as far as your next breath
and heaven unimaginably distant.
Gate after gate stands between you and God,
so why not meet the devil instead?
He at least has time for people.
-- 'The Priest's Confession"
Like characters in the funny papers,
under the heading
"Further Adventures of the Lost Tribe,"
we march past the third eye of History,
as it rocks back and forth
in its hammock of stars.
We strip away the tattered fabric
of the universe
to the juicy, dark meat,
the nothing beyond time.
We tear ourselves down atom by atom,
till electron and positron,
we become our own transcendent annihilation.
-- "The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer"
People go on with their lives
on this day that is one hundred years long,
on this sad red balloon of a planet,
the air escaping from it
like the hot, sour breath of a child.
-- "The Detective"
January 19, 2024
Dramatic monologues might not be everyone's favorite form of verse, but Ai sure makes you reconsider that line of thinking. She "splashes you awake" with shocking examinations of Jackie & Bobby Kennedy, Oppenheimer, Salome, & the Atlanta Child Murderer ...all the while in a terse narrative that, at times, reminds me of Sexton's amazing work Transformations. I felt this moved past Cruelty in terms of a poet getting to the heart of her art (& nice nods by Ai to Galway Kinnell, James Knight, & Robert Lowell).
June 8, 2021
All of it is searing, questioning, unflinching. Ai’s courage is the strongest I’ve seen.
As with my other favorites, these are poems that do not look away.
The Mother’s Tale is burned into us. We get relief because now we see this.
I’ll be reading the rest of Ai’s work. Still wondering why it’s taken me this late in life to hear of her, even though I know why. It still hurts.
As with my other favorites, these are poems that do not look away.
The Mother’s Tale is burned into us. We get relief because now we see this.
I’ll be reading the rest of Ai’s work. Still wondering why it’s taken me this late in life to hear of her, even though I know why. It still hurts.
February 18, 2020
This begins Ai’s shift toward longer, more narrative poems that feel ill-suited for verse, at times. I still love her—which is why I’m coming to her individual books after finishing her selected—but not much compares to Cruelty / Killing Floor.
January 17, 2025
This unfortunately was a DNF for me :( There is no doubt that works of Ai are impactful and well written, but I think there are poems here that fell flat and that made it hard to finish
September 24, 2008
The poem titled "Man with the Saxophone" or something similar is completely stunning; makes the whole book worth reading.
December 17, 2011
"The Testimony Of J. Robert Oppenheimer" is by far my favorite poem in this collection though the historical fictions are worth reading too.
August 13, 2012
{{{{{{{{{!!!!!!!}}}}}}}}}}}}}}
August 2, 2015
For me, the book got better as it went along. The last 1/4 was very powerful. I enjoyed the entire book, though. Some really power parts.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews