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."

Author: Mary Karr
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 04/17/1993
Series: New Directions Paperbook #0768
Pages: 51
Weight: 0.19lbs
Size: 7.95h x 5.34w x 0.21d
ISBN: 9780811212311


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 05/01/1993
Publishers Weekly 03/15/1993