The Devil's Tour, Vol. 768 Book

😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈
In the past year, I've read 3 volumes of Karr's poetry: _Sinner's Welcome_, _Tropic of Squalor_, and _Viper's Rum_. Most people, I would guess, first encounter Karr through her memoirs, but I stumbled on her theological poems (the series of poems she calls "Descending Theology") from a Google search. These theological poems created in me such a powerful urge to worship that I bought all of her books of poems on the spot. (Honest question: are there any other contemporary poets that write about religion like Mary Karr?)

This one, _The Devil's Tour_, is perhaps slightly less-good, IMO, from the others (all of which I gave 5*'s), but is still nonetheless stellar. Some favorites:
- "Coleman" (a heartbreaking poem about an interracial love story and southern lynching: you made the papers as a hunting accident )
- "Lunch" (a love poem: In the hours since breakfast I traveled the world's/ obstacle course to reach you-- rode my splot/ in traffic, scaled countless hills of paper/ as voices wormed through phone cords to my ear/ where I kept your moist words from the night before boxed all morning )
- "Average Torture" (a recognition of the 'torture' of the everyday: the multiple string/ of insignificance that's become your life )
- "Small But Urgent Request To the Unknowable" (a poem about small, miraculous goodness: bereaved widows to offer you coffee then/ the guestbook, and parched sailors adrift/ to share the day's thimble of water,/ and mothers to lift the most bent and broken children with joy and glad for the work of it. )
- "Accusing Message from Dead Father" (the speaker recalls her guilt at placing her aged father in a nursing home. She dreams he calls to offer her forgiveness; she wakes to see her answering machine mysteriously blinking...)
- "Her One Bad Eye" (speaker's mother gets an eye transplant: Finally, an old man died. His eyeballs where whisked/ crosstown in a jar of milk, to Mass Eye, then we arrived./ After the gauze was off,/ she had a new blue eye/ with a nick in it,/ like a fault in ice. )
-"Croup" and "Parents Taking Shape"

I'm grateful to have started 2019 with this volume! (I imagine I'll probably also get around to reading her memoirs this year, too.)