American Melancholy
Poems
by Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco
Poetry
Pub Date 09 Feb 2021
I am reviewing a copy of American Melancholy through Ecco and Netgalley:
Joyce Carol Oates is a powerful observer of the human heart, mind and soul with her profound social consciousness and is one of the insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history.
Oates is best known for her novels and short stories, many of these have become contemporary classics. But Oates has always written poetry faithfully. And this collection of American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades.
American Melancholy covers subjects that are both big and small. Joyce Carol Oates had written this collection in an immediate and engaging style, and touch both the personal as well as the political. The subjects of loss, love as well as 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. In this collection Oates masterfully 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.
I give American Melancholy five out of five stars!
Happy Reading!
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