Invisible woman: New & selected poems, 1970-1982

by Joyce Carol Oates

Light fading to dustjacket's spine, with two small tears to rear panel and light crease to upper corner, else a clean & bright copy.

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

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

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This selection contains poems from Sun Truths, The Forbidden, First Dark, A Report to an Academy, Selected Poems 1970-1978...

From Sun Truths...

A fist of cold strikes your face.
Each smiling crease made permanent.
I am not I, so bereft.
I have always been young.

Tears solid as pebbles,
trivial as pebbles, tears and words.
Again, the words. The same tears.
Again and still again,
the same
words, the tears,
the mourning,
the cold,
the same.

- The Mourning, pg. 15

From The Forbidden...

The relief not to be uttered,
the syllables not mouthed.
The mirrored door that flies open so swiftly
you see yourself in flight.
How alive, how alive,
how unexpected.

- The Forbidden, pg. 23

From A Report to an Academy...

You are not you
at such a height.
Strapped in the fiery air.

You are not you
at such speed.
Such weapons.

Below, "nations" and "history"
pass silently.
Miniature worlds,
invisible spires.
Absurd fluttering flags.

The plane's swift shadow is benign -
but swift.

The next hour, the next season,
fiery air all around,
a routine miracle.
You are not you
in your pressurized container.

It has already happened.
Weapons, but not revenge.
Revenge is not in our interest.

Soon, your prayer is soon,
it has already happened,
perhaps it will happen soon,
perhaps soon,
very soon,
your destination
strapped in place beside you.

- Ecstasy of Flight, pg. 59

From Selected Poems 1970-1978...

Fluid as music we pass through,
and return, bringing ancestors
to this new place:
our childhood bones merging, melting.
The map's old divisions snarl, breaking
as we pass invisibly through.

The continent takes us on,
and begins now to dream us:
worlds shading into worlds.
What integrity in our bones' fates structure? -
a new language dispels it.
A new meridian, a new alchemy
of sun and spangled shade.

Rituals seek to enter us,
- as if the body were a sacred event.

- Fertilizing the Continent, pg. 86

[Deanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just re-read and fell in love with Oates all over again.