Review by Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Flush with the success of her prose memoir, The Liars' Club, Kart confidently appends her misguided essay ""Against Decoration"" to her latest collection of tough-talking poems. Her half-baked notions about literary history and her somewhat simplistic aesthetic (""to stir emotion"") diminish an otherwise strong volume that covers much the same territory as her memoir: family dysfunction, alcoholism, suicide, and death-all redeemed somewhat by good sex (""Come spill yourself in me"") and an idiosyncratic notion of God that avoids the higher-power nostrums of the recovering. Karr slums among freaks and outcasts, hoping to shock with poems about a dwarf, an amputee, a graphic abortion, and other surgery, all in language full of rough images: skulls, snakes, razorblades, and guts. In a number of poems, Karr maintains a deathwatch for friends and family, later serving as a pallbearer, and also sorting through a dead woman's sweaters. Despite a dozen or so throwaway poems-little bits about a mistress's revenge, or a visit to the mall with her son-and her awkward infusion of classical allusions, Karr is capable of powerful work: Clever and unexpected rhymes illuminate her joyful vulgarity. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
