Description
Poems deal with the Los Angeles riots, and greed for money, power, sex, and love
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Greed for money, power, sex, and love is the theme at the heart of this new volume of dramatic monologues by Ai, her fifth book to date. Beginning with "Riot Act," a monologue about the Los Angeles uprising in April 1992, this collection is an exploration of racial and sexual politics through the voices of characters as diverse as Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald, J. Edgar Hoover, a battered wife who shoots her husband, an adopted child involved in an incestuous relationship, a priest-pedophile, and women in relationships that are going nowhere. Ai's particular gift is her ability to get inside the heads of the characters she writes about; the cumulative effect is no less shocking than the personal and public horrors we read about in the daily newspapers.
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