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    Viper Rum

    Part of Penguin Poets

    Author Mary Karr
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    Paperback
    $24.00 US
    Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
    On sale Sep 01, 2001 | 96 Pages | 9780142000182
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    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

    © Deborah Feingold
    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. View titles by Mary Karr

    About

    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.

    Table of Contents

    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

    Author

    © Deborah Feingold
    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. View titles by Mary Karr

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