American Melancholy: Poems
Oates concentrates her powerfully unnerving sensibility into poems that challenge and haunt.
To Marlon Brando In Hell
Because when asked what you were rebelling against you said with wonderful disdain, What’ve you got?
Because that was our answer too, that we had not such words to utter.
Jubilate: An Homage in Catterel* Verse
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published in The New Yorker, July 28, 2015 For I will consider my Cat Cherie for she is the very apotheosis of Cat-Beauty which is […]
SMILE
SMILE of course I was, I had always already begun SMILE yes certianly SMILE I laughed breathless I was plead- ing SMILE struck like paralysis SMILE! SMILE! as the darts […]
The Miraculous Birth
Christmas: The House Adrift in a wide white ocean of snow. Black December is a ditch winking overhead, but here beneath your parents’ roof the piecrust faces are dimpled by forks and the clock faces are round and smooth as buttons.
JonBenét Ramsey, America’s Most Famous Little Girl
A poem too can be a garrote. —Anon.
EDWARD HOPPER’S “11 A.M.,” 1926
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published in the New Yorker, August 27, 2012 She’s naked yet wearing shoes. Wants to think nude. And happy in her body. Though it’s a fleshy […]
Celestial Timepiece 