In urgent and unsettling poems that question national mythology, Oates (Tenderness) brings her talent as a storyteller and powers of observation to bear on a variety of American characters and institutions. Oates-s subjects range from Marlon Brando, whom she describes as the pinnacle of the -male predator- who -had thrown away greatness,- to the very concept of American history itself, which Oates addresses as a battered and beaten wreck bereft of any supposed former glory: -Old America freckled with melanomas,/ straggly hair to his shoulders/ like the boy-General Custer, and/ fester-/ ing sores/ on his back, sides, and belly/ has come home to die/ where no one remembers him-.- Many of these poems explore a deep contradiction inherent in the American psyche, as in the poem -Apocalypso,- which uses enjambed lines to playfully capture a morbid fascination with the fragmentation of social order: -Something thrill-/ ing in cata-/ clysm &/ in the col/ lapse of Empires.- Oates-s America is physically and psychologically distressed, but it cannot find solace -seeking milk, love,/ where there-s none.- Written with mournful and harrowing clarity, this collection reveals an America grown accustomed to cruelty and forgetting. (Feb.)