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book coverWomen Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money

by Joyce Carol Oates

Illustrations by Elizabeth Hansell

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978

80 pages

Dust Jacket Blurb

Joyce Carol Oates's fifth volume of poems, like its predecessors, centers on her remarkable and paradoxical vision of the intense intimacy between the self on one hand and nature and history on the other. Whatever happens in nature—whether in the physiological processes of the body, or in the vast processes of wind and water—happens in history. This is the condition of mass technological modern society, and it is, in Oates's vision, notably the condition of American society.

Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money may well be the most substantial poetic work of the woman who, according to Newsweek "belongs to that small group of writers who keep alive the central ambitions and energies of literature." It is a culminating work—one that augments the themes and craftsmanship of the poems of her previous four volumes. Its structure is a movement from what might be called the center of everyday selves outward into the mysterious metamorphoses of self in life and death, outward to the historical context of the self, and finally outward to the mystery of our disappearance into one another.

illustration of desk objects

Excerpt

The Lovers

Locked in love as the sky to its mock color
in a frieze of love like beauty in ancient profile
the lovers are a blantant litany
the lovers are hoarse with shouting of each other
their zeal eyeless and terrible
their moods promiscuous
as shiny black flies

Locked in love like the glowing bodies of wrestlers
in a panic of love as God pushes from every pore
the lovers laugh shrilly
the lovers see nothing funny
locked in love they are immortal
they are writhing in pain

Unlocked they would be like us
like us faintly quizzical
full-faced and glad of borders, walls,
ceilings, sills,
margins and boundaries and floors
and knowing what we are not

Locked in love they are tortured by Furies of thought:
Should one fail, what would the other do?
Should one lose faith, how would the other survive?
Mere death would canonize them
it is not mere death they fear

it is not mere death they fear

Reviews

  • Publisher's Weekly, May29, 1978, p47
  • Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1978, p744
  • Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1978, p145
  • Library Journal, October 1, 1978, p1988
  • Choice, December 1978, p1371
  • Stand, 1979, v20 n3 p73
  • New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1979, p15, 59
  • World Literature Today, Summer 1979, p512

Contents

I. WOMEN WHOSE LIVES ARE FOOD, MEN WHOSE LIVES ARE MONEY

Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money

Visionary Adventures of a Wild Dog Pack

Hauled from River, Sunday 8 A.M.

Former Movie Queen, Dying of Cancer, Watches an Old Movie of Hers at a Film Festival in San Francisco

The Eternal Children

From the Dark Side of the Earth

II. METAMORPHOSES

Lovers Asleep
The Spectre
The Lovers
Fever Song
Addiction
Last Harvest
Holy Saturday
Skyscape
Metamorphoses
The Demons
At the Seashore
After Sunset
Guilt
Abandoned Airfield, 1977

III. THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD

If You Must Go and I must Stay
There Are Those Who Die
Pretty Death
The Suicide
The Broken Man
Enigma
Ice Age
Coronary Thrombosis
Preventing the Death of the Brain
Rumpled Bed
The Resurrection of the Dead

IV. PUBLIC OUTCRY

Happy Birthday
Public Outcry
American Independence
Gala Power Blackout of New York City, July '77
The Noisy Sorrowful Ones
Revelations
At Peace, at Rest
Wealthy Lady
He Traveled by Jet First Class to Tangier

V. MANY ARE CALLED

The Creation
Not-being
Love Poem
That
An Infant's Song
In Medias Res
Earth-Rituals
Fertilizing the Continent
Many Are Called

Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/poetry/food.html

  
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