Joyce Carol Oates's imagination runs to violent extremes [in "Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money"]: a pack of snarling wild dogs; or the monologue of a dead woman dragged out of a river; a man having a heart attack; or, in one of the book's stronger poems, a flooding river tearing the dead out of the cemetery earth in a soggy dark resurrection. Violence is not so much the subject of those poems as it is their element. A groundswell of violent images carries the reader, and often dazzles him, until the poems seem like segments of a stream of language; a stream whose direction is often unclear, and when it is clear is often not as interesting as the flow itself…. [In the poem "Guilt" the] scene is vivid, yet austere. The cumulative pulsing of images resembles the icy flow of the stream...