Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as her memoirs. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous—that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The "squalor" of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power—illness, death, love’s agonized disappointments. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. She never preaches. But whether you’re an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness.
“A catalogue of broken graces.... Scorched, palpable, sometimes pungent, sometimes brutal: Karr’s new collection is a mixture of tight narratives that end without resolution, hymns of unsettled suffering, and confused prayers.” (The Millions) “Know best for her bold memoirs, Karr brings the same scorching frankness to her vivid, kinetic lyrics.... Karr’s poems are thrilling in their vitality, dazzle, nerve, longing, and camouflaged depth.” (Booklist) "She manages to write about religion in the most honest, real way possible—in a way that rings true, no matter what you believe in." (Bookriot) "As in all her work, Karr’s genius is in creating her own music from a mashup of lexicons, daringly and often wittily infusing the lyrical with everyday vernacular." (Bookpage) |
An Excerpt
I. Genesis: Animal Planet
I rose up first in a big vacant state with an x in its middle
to mark the place I was born into dying
surrounded by oil refinery towers with flames
like giant birthday candles you could never
get big enough to blow out. Before I was
they were, and before them, reptiles and mammals
died and rotted and were crushed into carbon
then coal, then oil in the earth
whose deep core held bigger burning.
My daddy labored here, at The Gulf,
which meant oil refinery, but also
a distance he drowned in,
caged inside this high hurricane fence.
In steel-toed boots for forty-two years, he walked.
The gold hatpin he got at retirement
had four diamond chips
for a smile and two rubies like eyes,
and he passed it to me
because it was a holy relic
of suffering and sacrifice,
so I wanted it most.
He breathed in this chemical stink
some days sixteen hours or days on end
in a storm, and it perfumed his overalls.
The catalyst he pumped on the cracking unit
burst through with enormous pressure to break down
the black crude's chemical bonds
into layers, into products,
and many ignorant men did twist the spigots
and unplug the clogs and keep it all
rivering so the buried pipes
could carry out so many flammables north--
North! Where books are written and read.
The sunset down here glows green and hard-washed
denim blue and the scalded pink of flesh.
I. Genesis: Animal Planet
I rose up first in a big vacant state with an x in its middle
to mark the place I was born into dying
surrounded by oil refinery towers with flames
like giant birthday candles you could never
get big enough to blow out. Before I was
they were, and before them, reptiles and mammals
died and rotted and were crushed into carbon
then coal, then oil in the earth
whose deep core held bigger burning.
My daddy labored here, at The Gulf,
which meant oil refinery, but also
a distance he drowned in,
caged inside this high hurricane fence.
In steel-toed boots for forty-two years, he walked.
The gold hatpin he got at retirement
had four diamond chips
for a smile and two rubies like eyes,
and he passed it to me
because it was a holy relic
of suffering and sacrifice,
so I wanted it most.
He breathed in this chemical stink
some days sixteen hours or days on end
in a storm, and it perfumed his overalls.
The catalyst he pumped on the cracking unit
burst through with enormous pressure to break down
the black crude's chemical bonds
into layers, into products,
and many ignorant men did twist the spigots
and unplug the clogs and keep it all
rivering so the buried pipes
could carry out so many flammables north--
North! Where books are written and read.
The sunset down here glows green and hard-washed
denim blue and the scalded pink of flesh.