American Melancholy
Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five years
Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history.
Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades.
Covering subjects big and small, and written in an immediate and engaging style, this collection touches on both the personal and political. Loss, love, and memory are investigated, along with the upheavals of our modern age, the reality of our current predicaments, and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest. Oates skillfully writes characters ranging from a former doctor at a Chinese People’s Liberation Army hospital to Little Albert, a six-month-old infant who took part in a famous study that revealed evidence of classical conditioning in human beings.
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In urgent and unsettling poems that question national mythology, Oates (Tenderness) brings her talent as a storyteller and powers of observation to bear on a variety of American characters and institutions. Oates's subjects range from Marlon Brando, whom she describes as the pinnacle of the "male predator" who "had thrown away greatness," to the very concept of American history itself, which Oates addresses as a battered and beaten wreck bereft of any supposed former glory: "Old America freckled with melanomas,/ straggly hair to his shoulders/ like the boy General Custer, and/ fester-/ ing sores/ on his back, sides, and belly/ has come home to die/ where no one remembers him ." Many of these poems explore a deep contradiction inherent in the American psyche, as in the poem "Apocalypso," which uses enjambed lines to playfully capture a morbid fascination with the fragmentation of social order: "Something thrill-/ ing in cata-/ clysm &/ in the col/ lapse of Empires." Oates's America is physically and psychologically distressed, but it cannot find solace "seeking milk, love,/ where there's none." Written with mournful and harrowing clarity, this collection reveals an America grown accustomed to cruelty and forgetting.
