A review by flickeringlights
American Melancholy: Poems by Joyce Carol Oates

1.0

I can't believe she's a university professor in Princeton and she's putting out this sort of crap. Almost all of the poems have an air of pretentiousness, a burst bubble of saying more than they actually say. Though I prefer more structured poetry, I can't say that I don't appreciate free-form, but this is... It doesn't read like poetry. It reads like someone wrote avant-garde snippets and liberally applied the "enter" key to make it poetry. It doesn't have a pleasant rhythm of cadence and is steeped in a weird haughty postmodernist mood. The poems weren't nearly as cheeky or clever as they wanted to be.

I can't believe this was my first read of 2023! What a stinker.