American Melancholy

Starred review from December 21, 2020
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.

Starred review from February 1, 2021

We do not think of poetry as Oates's genre; she is so cherished and prolific in prose, especially fiction (e.g., A Book of American Martyrs), that it is difficult to recall that she has always taken an interest in the field, as both critic and writer. This new collection includes works of widely varying lengths and perspectives, from near-narrative pieces such as "Doctor Help Me" to lyrics almost like epigrams such as "The First Room" and even a single work in an approach she has always favored, shaped poetry ("The Kite Poem"--you guessed it). Oates writes with the great fluency and authority of her remarkable experience as the creator of a flood of stories and characters; this particular volume is at its best when she is farthest from her fiction and sees with a poet's eye, as in "This Is Not a Poem," in which she distances herself from stale poetic tropes for this: "it is a slew/ of words in search/ of a container--/ a sleek green stalk,/ a transparent lung,/ a single hair's curl,/ a cooing of vowels / like doves." VERDICT Oates's high profile as a novelist should not discourage avid poetry readers from seeking out this volume, which aptly demonstrates the writer's gifts in the genre and includes several poems of the highest quality.--Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2021
In her poetry, as in her fiction, Oates is not especially concerned with her readers' comfort, though her goal is far larger than discomfiture for its own sake. Several poems center on long-past scientific experiments, imagining not only the cruelty exacted but also the moral contortions of those inflicting pain in the name of science, and sometimes art, in poems such as "American Sign Language." Some especially resonant poems subject figures from the past, both well-known (Edward Hopper's wife and model, Jo) and unknown ("Loney," a character who could have come from Cather or Steinbeck), to a kind of retrospective psychological anatomizing. The result is melancholy, yes, but it also carries a sense of American inevitability that is only visible with the sufficient passage of time. The savage centerpiece of the book, "Marlon Brando in Hell," asks what we are owed by an idol who made us love and lust for him and then made us watch his slow, unsavory dissipation. Oates concentrates her powerfully unnerving sensibility into poems that challenge and haunt.

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