Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money: Poems

by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates's fifth volume of poems tells of the central concerns of everyday lives, the metamorphoses undergone in life and death, and the merging of the individual self with others

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Jennifer Kanke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this book before, I will read this book again. Its sad rhythms are inescapable and its yearning for life pushes through.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joyce Carol Oates, Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (Louisiana State U Press, 1978)

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. ***

[Nicolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

She knows how to make words do just what she wants.

Podcast spotlight on Joyce Carol Oates: https://soundcloud.com/allthebooks/ep...

[Rene Bonilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Eternal Children, bought back memories of my childhood in Brooklyn, NY.