Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Phillips, Robert (Schaeffer) - Joyce Carol Oates

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JOYCE CAROL OATES

[In The Pregnant Man, Robert Phillips is] idiosyncratic, rather wildly inventive … speaking with a wry, sad humor of the sort of pregnancy a man must endure…. In "The Married Man," "The Cultivated Man" …, "The Invisible Man," and "Hand Poem" Phillips presents a compelling alternative vision to Rich's oppressive "male god"; feminists should read The Pregnant Man if for no other reason than to see, to be forced to see, that "feminine" sensitivity (and, indeed, suffering) is hardly the exclusive lot of women. In a fantasy, "The Skin Game," the poet acquires a wet-suit to protect him … and in "The Stone Crab: A Love Poem," he establishes a rather frightful identity with a creature whose giant claw is broken from him to be eaten (the crab itself is thrown back into the sea so that he can grow another claw). How many losses can he endure?, Phillips inquires.

The first section of The Pregnant Man is called "Body Icons,"...

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1. Introduction
2. William Van O'Connor
3. Andrew Curry
4. Robert Emmet Long
5. L. S. Dembo
6. Joyce Carol Oates
7. Jerome Mazzaro
8. Alan Williamson
9. James Finn Cotter
10. G. E. Murray
11. David Sanders
12. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates