By Maya C. Popa |
In
American Melancholy (Ecco, Feb.), Joyce Carol Oates draws on her storytelling gifts, and her personal grief, to paint an unsettling portrait of America today. “These poems explore a deep contradiction inherent in the American psyche,”
PW’s starred review said. “Oates’s America is physically and psychologically distressed, but it cannot find solace ‘seeking milk, love,/ where there’s none.’ ” In an email exchange, the author discussed her first poetry collection in 25 years.
What prompted a new book of verse?
I have continued to write poems, for it’s in poetry that we feel most intensely and intimately. Poetry is a kind of music. There can be a haunting lyricism that speaks to us beneath the level of consciousness, but there can also be a poetry of droll, startling statements.