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Most readers know Mary Karr as the author of the widely acclaimed and bestselling memoirs The Liars' Club and Cherry. But before those two books, Karr won praise as a poet whose "bracing, tight-lipped" poems "take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own." (Poetry). Karr's third collection portrays personal catharsis in many guises--sexual, familial, spiritual. Various beloveds are birthed and buried in precise, touching lyrics. Also here is Karr's prize-winning essay "Against Decoration," which set off a national controversy when first published in Parnassus. In it, Karr takes aim against verbal ornament and "the high-brow doily making" that too often passes for poetry these days."
“Like Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney, Karr intends poetry of the plain style and the truth of the unmistakably situated self, but is taught also by desire.” (Allen Grossman) “You could say that Karr is a poet who refuses to flinch, even if the landscape of memory and experience resembles a particularly gruesome Bosch canvas, and who, for the most part, refuses to be consoled.” (The Chicago Review) “Karr stares hard in the face of hard fact… These poems rip up the Hallmark card and replace it with the difficult, demanding claims of love in an imperfect world… ‘Against Decoration,’ her courageous and provocative essay, is important...No poet writing today should proceed without at least noting Karr’s legitimate misgivings and taking them into account.” (Georgia Review) |
An Excerpt
Viper Rum
All day we had run-ins with jungle snakes.
Above my canoe, a tiny vine serpent
like a single strand of luminous green linguini
moved in a quick, muscular S from black orchid
to unripe mango to strangler fig.
Back at the lodge, a coral snake on the stucco floor
sent an old Girl Scout rhyme slantwise through my head:
“Red by yellow, kill a fellow.
Red by black, friend of Jack.”
The waiter caught it in a Hellman’s mustard jar
and we all stood around the bar
while it swayed hesitant behind the glass.
Once it curled back in on itself
the small knot of fear in my chest
unloosed. Over stew, the archaeologist
told how his friend surprised
in a ceremonial Mayan pot
the fer de lance or Tommygoff,
which never doesn’t bit. “She made
a double tourniquet right off
and only lost the limb,” he said.
Far off, a howler monkey pack started
the whiskey-throated roars
that maybe kept a jaguar back.
That’s when the proprietress brought out the viper rum,
a gallon jug wide-mouthed enough
to fit inside the wrist-thick python
that circled there, flat-faced.
Shot glasses went round. The lid unscrewed
let out some whiff of Caribbean herb
that promised untold mystery unfolding in your head.
The python’s lidless eyes were white, mouth
O-shaped, perfect for a cocktail straw, I thought.
Then naturally, I cast back to those years
I drank, alone nights at the kitchen sink,
bathrobed, my head hatching snakes,
while my baby slept in his upstairs cage
and my marriage choked to death.
I should have wound up in a fetal coil
eyes scalded of sight, staring out
at the warped and vacant world.
What plucked me from that fate
can’t yet be named, but I do reverence to it
every day. So my untouched shot glass still
flipped upside down, I said goodnight. Outside,
the moon was a smoky disk, the path to my hut
loaded with white magnolia petals,
so every step sent out a fragrant mist
that wound up filling my circular
thatched hut—the flowers’ flesh
got mashed in my boot soles.
My hammock cradled me in its knotted web.
All around a thousand radiant wings
Were shimmering. The jungle hummed.
--for Deb Larson
Viper Rum
All day we had run-ins with jungle snakes.
Above my canoe, a tiny vine serpent
like a single strand of luminous green linguini
moved in a quick, muscular S from black orchid
to unripe mango to strangler fig.
Back at the lodge, a coral snake on the stucco floor
sent an old Girl Scout rhyme slantwise through my head:
“Red by yellow, kill a fellow.
Red by black, friend of Jack.”
The waiter caught it in a Hellman’s mustard jar
and we all stood around the bar
while it swayed hesitant behind the glass.
Once it curled back in on itself
the small knot of fear in my chest
unloosed. Over stew, the archaeologist
told how his friend surprised
in a ceremonial Mayan pot
the fer de lance or Tommygoff,
which never doesn’t bit. “She made
a double tourniquet right off
and only lost the limb,” he said.
Far off, a howler monkey pack started
the whiskey-throated roars
that maybe kept a jaguar back.
That’s when the proprietress brought out the viper rum,
a gallon jug wide-mouthed enough
to fit inside the wrist-thick python
that circled there, flat-faced.
Shot glasses went round. The lid unscrewed
let out some whiff of Caribbean herb
that promised untold mystery unfolding in your head.
The python’s lidless eyes were white, mouth
O-shaped, perfect for a cocktail straw, I thought.
Then naturally, I cast back to those years
I drank, alone nights at the kitchen sink,
bathrobed, my head hatching snakes,
while my baby slept in his upstairs cage
and my marriage choked to death.
I should have wound up in a fetal coil
eyes scalded of sight, staring out
at the warped and vacant world.
What plucked me from that fate
can’t yet be named, but I do reverence to it
every day. So my untouched shot glass still
flipped upside down, I said goodnight. Outside,
the moon was a smoky disk, the path to my hut
loaded with white magnolia petals,
so every step sent out a fragrant mist
that wound up filling my circular
thatched hut—the flowers’ flesh
got mashed in my boot soles.
My hammock cradled me in its knotted web.
All around a thousand radiant wings
Were shimmering. The jungle hummed.
--for Deb Larson