One has to admit that Joyce Carol Oates's poetry is sometimes a bit prosy. Fortunately for the listener, her prose is particularly fine. Even in a poem like "To Marlon Brando in Hell," which could afford to be shorter, we are gripped and propelled by the language. Cheryl Smith's narration is as controlled as the words themselves, which reveal the emotional content of the text more than dramatizing it. Most of the poems are, at least on the surface, more intellectual and thoughtful than passionate, and Smith resists the temptation to oversell the subtexts. Only a few of the poems seem deeply self-revelatory, and Smith retains her sense of balance even with these. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

"Joyce Carol Oates is a ventriloquist of mind. In these startling new poems, she enters human suffering, her own and that of others, with a disarming imaginative directness. Her empathy for others lights these scary poems from the inside out. The mental and emotional suffering that she uncovers in people’s stories comes to feel like our own, a crucial reminder that we are all here together in what seem like the last days. Frontal in their imagining yet deeply compassionate, these are poems we need right now." — Chase Twichell, author of Things as It Is

"Here is Joyce Carol Oates in her immense capacity to see human frailty.  In poems that are both tensely concise and loosely expansive, she is an accessible experimenter.  Humiliation and failure cannot be escaped.  But sweetness and mercy emerge, too.  American Melancoly is a fervid, painful, virtuosic book." — Henri Cole

"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." — Library Journal (starred review)

"Joyce Carol Oates is a ventriloquist of mind. In these startling new poems, she enters human suffering, her own and that of others, with a disarming imaginative directness. Her empathy for others lights these scary poems from the inside out. The mental and emotional suffering that she uncovers in people’s stories comes to feel like our own, a crucial reminder that we are all here together in what seem like the last days. Frontal in their imagining yet deeply compassionate, these are poems we need right now."

"Here is Joyce Carol Oates in her immense capacity to see human frailty.  In poems that are both tensely concise and loosely expansive, she is an accessible experimenter.  Humiliation and failure cannot be escaped.  But sweetness and mercy emerge, too.  American Melancoly is a fervid, painful, virtuosic book."

★ 02/01/2021

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