Mary Karr

Viper Rum is Mary Karr’s first book since The Liars’ Club, which helped to spark a renaissance in memoir. That breathtaking bestseller about her Texas childhood rode The New York Times bestseller list for more than sixty weeks. It was hailed by The Washington Post as “the essential American story, a beauty.” Critic James Atlas likened her to Faulkner. Molly Ivins remarked in The Nation, “[The Liars’ Club] is so good I thought about sending it out for a second opinion… To have a poet’s precision of language and a poet’s insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing gift.” Now that gift returns to its origins in poetry. Viper Rum delves into the autobiographical subject matter of her two earlier collections (The Devil’s Tour, New Directions, 1994 and Abacus, Wesleyan, 1987). Various beloveds are birthed and buried in these touching lyrics, some of which––as the title suggests––deal with drink: “I cast back to those last 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…” Precise and surprising, her poems “take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own” (Poetry). The prize-winning essay “Against Decoration,” which first set off a controversy in Parnassus, serves as an Afterword. In it, Karr attacks the popular trend toward ornament in contemporary poetry: “the highbrow doily-making that passes for art today.”

In her celebrated essay “Against Decoration,” published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a “new formalism” that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are “humanist poems,” written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience––poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. Of The Devil’s Tour, her newest collection, she writes: “This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: ’The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav’n or a heav’n of hell … I myself am hell.”