What I like most about Ai's poems was her ability to take the persona poem and really make the poem about the persona. In many of the poems I felt like I was immersed in the characters she had created, to the point were it felt like these people were really writing the poems themselves. Given the topics Ai writes about this often became unsettling. Not in a bad way, but unsettling none the less. For example in "The Kid" when Ai writes

"and I squeeze the rod, raise it, his skull splits open.
Mother runs toward us. I stand still,
get her across the spine as she bends over him." (36)

I felt like this kid was actually writing the poem, and the thought of anybody actually being able to do such awful things really gives her poems a dark and unforgiving tone that really cuts into the reader. Sometimes I even wondered if it was necessary for Ai to add these horrific elements to her poems. Like in "The Hitchhiker" I was uncertain what exactly Ai was going for, and I began to wonder why I was reading a poem about a guy murdering some woman. In this poem the graphic elements, and the poem itself felt like it was simply for shock value.

Of course I may just not be getting the poem, I still cannot figure out what the number 35 in a tear has to do with the poem, and I get the feeling like it might be important. But I still felt this way about other poems of hers. Even in "The Kid" I wondered if it was necessary to include all the violence.

Another aspect of Ai's poetry that really stood out was her ability to capture not just a person, but an entire time period. I thought this was a very clever way of capturing an era. Like in "The Detective" when she writes about this man who had been to Vietnam, she does not just write about the man, she writes about an entire time period, and an entire era of people.

I normally do not care for poetry that is political, or poetry which overtly tries to capture the feeling of an entire era, mostly because I think it often times feels preachy or didactic. However I think Ai gets away with it because she is capturing just one person, and in capturing one person, she captures all the shades of politics and the feeling of an era. To use the example of "The Detective" again,

"I look into the back seat
The Twentieth Century is there,
wearing a necklace of grenades
that glitters against its black skin.
I stare see the pins
have all been pulled.
Drive, says the voice"

I do not know what it was like to live through the Vietnam war, but I imagine it felt a lot like this. I never really thought of persona poems as tools which could allow the poet to write about these things, which is why i think I liked many of Ai's poems, they were always surprising me.