Ai uses both sexes as speakers in her poems. In Twenty-year
Marriage there is a female speaker who is speaking to her
husband through her body movements. It is a man conveying
thoughts to the mother of his dead child in Abortion. Both poems
are very moving and believable. They present themselves as
spoken by a particular character who has let the reader into
their souls. The wife of twenty years, and the poor male speak
with a blunt passion. There is an intensity that makes them
plausible as characters. Ai creates speakers who invite a reader
deep into their thoughts. Both Twenty-Year Marriage and Abortion
feature speakers who are strikingly real. Kevin Everod Quashie
writes of Ai; "She investigates and interrogates power
relationships in social situations. She is a consummate artist
in her ability to represent the timbre and contour of so many
different and unlikely voices" (15) Ai can describe a certain
feeling, smell, vision, or sound so clearly that the reader can
imagine what speaker of the poem is going through. The fire and
passion that people feel is visible in the voice of Ai's poems.
The female speaker's voice seems patient and giving in
Twenty-Year Marriage. After all of the years she's spent she
still desires her husband in a sexual way. Ai uses the voice of
the woman so well it seems as if she is coming alive and speaking
to the reader. The attitude of the poem is that of desire.
Sexual desire, belonging, love and acceptance from her husband is
what this woman craves. This takes place in the truck which may
be old, perhaps as old as their marriage together. She gives the
truck human characteristics such as the fake leather thigh. She
also compares herself to the truck saying that she is the "same
size, shape, make as twenty years ago. She has to compare
herself to a vehicle because it's somethi...