Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates, well known for her novels (Monster, Blonde, We Were the Mulvaneys, etc.) and essays (On Boxing, The Edge of Impossibility, etc.), is also a noted poet whose work appears with regularity in some of North America's finest journals of poetry. Women Whose Lives Are Food... was her fifth collection.

It's not much of a stretch to say that Oates is drawn to darkness; the one thread that runs consistently throughout her work is an impending sense of doom. The reader is always waiting for the drop of the other shoe. As with the longer works, so with the poetry. And from that standpoint, Women Whose Lives Are Food... delivers on all counts. The book's sole problem, and it is unfortunately a large one, is that Oates at times abandons the tale-telling that is her strength and ventures off into the usually-unforgivable and always-second class world of the message poem. The simple fact is that politics and poetry don't mix, no matter how many people try it; good political poetry is the very rare exception, not the rule. The end result is a readable, but inconsistent, book; when Oates is firing on all cylinders, her stuff is as fine as one would expect from one of America's foremost authors.

“All night the flesh of trees cracks
and in the morning the eye can gauge no distance,
the ear is deafened in white.

A world of glass!--many-winged glare of ice.”
(“Ice Age”)

While such moments are comparatively few, there's more of them here than one would expect from the random book of poetry, and they're frequent enough to make the book worth searching out, especially for the author's fans.