Tenderness: Poems

by Joyce Carol Oates

Now in paperback, the most recent volume of poems by the award-winning author. Tenderness , the eighth volume of verse by Joyce Carol Oates, is a generous selection of fifty-seven poems, ranging in voice from the lyric to the narrative to the satiric. Most of them have appeared in prominent magazines and literary journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Triquarterly ; all feature Oates at the height of her powers.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

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

[Daniel Oster · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars - Though I think that Oates may be a better prose writer than poet, I was pleasantly surprised by her poetry, as this is the first volume of her poems that I've read by her. I feel like some poems could have been condensed, but Oates has a nice way of using accessible language for the reader, and using the language to create lasting images for each of the poems

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kresge’s!

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

Joyce Carol Oates, Tenderness (Ontario Review Press, 1996)

While I'm a huge fan of Joyce Carol Oates' prose-- Cybele alone would have me singing her praises as one of America's finest living novelists, the rest is icing-- I've never been all that enamored with her poetry. Tenderness is an improvement over the volumes I've read to date, but honestly, not much of one. Every once in a while, she turns a good phrase or catches a really fine metaphor, but there's still a somewhat distressing lack of subtlety here, and when what little there is flies out the window, sometimes the resulting work is just painful to read:

“It's an ordinary morning & an ordinary flight, even in my new skin that's a fact I must acknowledge!
I've been here before, I meet myself returning swaying from the lavatory, I avoid my eyes!
Through the pressurized cabin waft the usual psittacosis viruses, Bacillus leprae, airborne TB!
Belted snug in Seat 2B my faceless companion reads Forbes,
I am belted snug at 30,000 feat reading Scientific American!
Must mark off universe into units of a certain length I am reading!
Infinity with a geometric figure I am reading!”
(“Frequent Flier II”)

Ouch. Three pages of this. (And, yes, every line that does not end with a question mark ends with an exclamation point. It's Tappy Tibbons afraid of flying.)

I rush to point out that most of the book is not this bad. It's not great, mind you, but this, I suspect, is a nadir for Joyce Carol Oates writing in any form. The strongest pieces (“Like Walking to a Drug Store, When I Get Out”), not surprisingly, are those where she returns to the same ground she covers in her strongest novels—getting inside the heads of the damaged, the twisted. Unfortunately, there are far too few pieces of this ilk here; I suggest grabbing this from the library and reading them, rather than adding this to your collection. **

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection. It is divided into four sections--my favorites are the first two. They tended to favor the personal. I was not so enamored with the reflections of American culture or her inhabiting vastly different characters. They just did not have the same pull. She has a wonderful and imaginative vocabulary. I enjoyed living in these words.

"You might have drowned. You lived,
and immediately forgot.
What to make of old surprises, old loves,
broken shells between the toes?
These dull spent late summer waves at Wolf's Head Lake?"

"All Saturday drains into the gutters."

"The stink of ancient damp stone.
A glimmer down there of something blue, broken glass?--
plastic?--incapable of rotting.
Looks like forever."

[Antonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty prosy -- though not all. I wasn't crazy about most of these poems, though there were moments, phrases that grabbed me. I do appreciate the wealth of contemporary culture, authentic American experience, the recreation of many scenes from my own adolescence that were interesting, if a little painful, to revisit. . . . "what we haven't known we've lost."

Love this: "for beyond death there is traffic." (from "Old Concord Cemetary"

I particularly liked the poems "$," "Orion," and "Recollection, In Tranquility."

[Isaac Timm · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first three poems were great. This collection really brought me out of a funk. Her narrative poems are amazing. "Sexy" and "Tenderness" were my favorites.