Viper Rum

Description

In her third collection of poetry, Viper Rum, Mary Karr delves into autobiographical subject matter; 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, Karr’s poems “take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own” (Poetry).

Also included is Karr’s controversial and prize-winning essay “Against Decoration,” in which she took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days-the “new formalism” that elevates form to an end itself.viper rumViper Rum
Incant Against Suicide
The Wife of Jesus Speaks
The Last of the Brooding Miserables
Four of the Horsemen (Hypertense and Stroke, Coronary Occlusion and Cerebral Insult)
Hubris
The Patient
Adieu
Beauty and the Shoe Sluts
Field of Skulls
Summons (or This Won’t Hurt You a Bit and It’ll Cheer Me Up)
Requiem for the New Year
The Grand Miracle
Mr. D. Refuses the Blessing
Terminus
Limbo: Altered States
The Pallbearer
The Century’s Worst Blizzard
Revenge of the Ex-Mistress
Dead Drunk (or The Monster-Maker at Work)
Animistic Anatomy
Mall Crawl
Christ’s Passion
Domestic Ruins
The Invention of God in a Mouthful of Milk
County Fair
Belongings
Lifecycle Stairmaster
Chosen Blindess

Afterword: Against Decoration

Notes
Index of Titles & First Lines

Mary Karr’s poems and essays have won Pushcart prizes and have appeared in magazines such as the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Parnassus. She was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College, and is now the Jesse Truesdale Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse.US

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