Viper Rum

( 1 )

All Available Formats + Editions

$3.23

$14.98

Paperback

$3.23

$14.98

Viper Rum (Reissue) Pub. Date: 9/28/2001 Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
$6.00

$19.95

Hardcover

$6.00

$19.95

Viper Rum Pub. Date: 4/1/1998 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation

Want to read this on your NOOK? Request as NOOK Book from the publisher

Thank you for requesting this book as a NOOK book from the publisher.

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

Advertising

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Stephanie Zacharek

You'd think a poet's discipline -- all that incising, sharpening, carving away -- would automatically make him or her a tidy, evocative prose stylist, but that isn't always the case. Sometimes when poets turn to prose, they churn out paragraphs that resemble dense thickets of metaphor, their occasional flashes of beauty choked off by too many rich words circling and closing in. That certainly wasn't the case with Mary Karr, a poet who first earned notoriety with a steely, moving (and bestselling) memoir, The Liar's Club. If a poet can write prose like that, the next question -- at least for those who, after reading the memoir, didn't seek out Karr's earlier work -- is, What are her poems like?

Viper Rum, a trim collection of poems topped off by an essay decrying the new formalism in poetry, reads like a shot, suggesting that for Karr, the disciplines that go into shaping poetry and writing prose interlock naturally without jostling or bumping elbows. Karr isn't one of those dreadful poets whose lines announce, with a superior sniff, how positively in love they are with the nuances of language. Instead she just digs right in up to her elbows, with poems about the jagged sense of loss after the death of a parent (and the slow drift of pain that often comes before), about keeping ourselves together against the tragedies we sometimes manufacture for ourselves, about the seemingly small challenges, like not drinking, that in some lives rear up with a repetitive fury.

The title poem outlines a jungle adventure in which someone catches a python; afterward, in the local watering hole, the proprietress celebrates by breaking out a bottle of rum as the snake sits nearby, curled up in a big jar. "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." That the shot of rum is refused by the narrator isn't the issue -- there's no sanctimony here. The poem ends with the simple phrase "The jungle hummed" -- a suggestion of both its dangers and its beauty, and a wholehearted acceptance of both.

Viper Rum is one of those books for modern people who are scared of poetry (you know who you are). Even if you don't particularly respond to the humor, the aggressive vitality or the hovering veil of despair in Karr's work, it's easy enough to admire her devotion to clarity. In "Against Decoration," the essay that closes the book, Karr makes the case that strict adherence to formal structure and overuse of metaphor don't do modern poetry any favors, sapping emotion from it and obscuring needlessly what the poet really means to say. It's a fearless essay, the literary equivalent of sassin' back, as Karr pokes and prods at the work of James Merrill, Amy Clampitt and other poets who generally tend to get the white-glove treatment. Karr goes at them with the gloves off, and you get the sense that when she sits down to her own poetry, she attacks it in the same way, bare-fisted and two-fisted. The careful crafting essential to decent poetry is there, but Karr also seems to know that sometimes no amount of fussing will cause the words to fall in just the right order. Sometimes you just have to knock them into shape. -- Salon

Library Journal

It takes hubris to preface a negative critique of one's contemporaries with 45 pages of one's own verse, but Karr is a strong enough writer to pull it off. The Liar's Club (Viking, 1995), her best-selling memoir of growing up in Texas, is credited with having revived a genre; her third collection takes readers over much of the same autobiographical terrain-family, broken relationships, alcoholism, and suicide. This is confessional writing that conjures up the physical world: "On the mudroad of plodding American bodies/ my son wove like an antelope from stall/ to stall and want to want. I no'ed it all." The clarity and passion here are what Karr finds lacking in the overelaborate work of some of her colleagues, as she explains in the essay "Against Decoration," which first appeared in the journal Parnassus. Sharp and well written, it attacks, unfairly at times, the so-called neoformalists, language poets, James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, and John Ashbery (readers may wonder what Karr makes of Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, or Lewis Carroll). Ironically, one of the best poems here, about a Stairmaster, is almost Merrill-esque. Highly recommended anyway.--Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York

More Reviews (5) Fewer Reviews

Chicago Tribune

Readers of The Liars' Club will find poetic versions of some of the same autobiographical material.

Judith Kitchen

The poems of Viper Rum may be blunt for bluntness' sake, but they are not exploitative.
—The Georgia Review

Robert McDowell

Karr's grim wit and compressed, charged language seldom fail in Viper Rum's twenty-nine poems.

Tina Barr

[A] terrific, plot-driven collection concerning themes that include alcoholism, religious belief, death, love, family, salvation, transformation....One cannot help but cheer.
—Harvard Review

Harvard Review

"A terrific, plot-driven collection...incisive, idiosyncratic, whetted to an edge, and often funny."

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780142000182
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Publication date: 9/28/2001
Edition description: Reissue
Pages: 96
Sales rank: 731,856
Series: Poets, Penguin Series
Product dimensions: 5.53 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 0.26 (d)

Meet the Author

Mary Karr

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.

viper rum Viper 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

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 1

( 1 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(0)

4 Star

(0)

3 Star

(0)

2 Star

(0)

1 Star

(1)

Your Rating:

Review Guidelines

Tell the world what you think of this product.

Add Recommendations

Your Name: Create a Pen Name or Leave Anonymously

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

- HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
- Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
- Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
- Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
- Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
- Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
- Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

- By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
- Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
- See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.

Anonymous

Posted October 27, 2008

No text was provided for this review.

If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble

Viper Rum

Overview

All Available Formats + Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Related Subjects

Editorial Reviews

Stephanie Zacharek

Library Journal

Chicago Tribune

Judith Kitchen

Robert McDowell

Tina Barr

Harvard Review

Product Details

Meet the Author

Mary Karr

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

Rating Distribution

5 Star

4 Star

3 Star

2 Star

1 Star

Your Rating:

Your Recommendations:

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

What to exclude from your review:

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

Reminder:

Recommend other products that relate to your review. Just search for them below and share!