Tropic of Squalor

Poems

Mary Karr

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062699848
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

A new volume of poetry from the New York Times bestselling and esteemed author of The Liar's Club and Lit.

Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as her memoirs. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous—that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The "squalor" of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power—illness, death, love's agonized disappointments. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. She never preaches. But whether you're an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness.

The Less Holy Bible

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

—Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

I. Genesis: Animal Planet

I rose up first in a big vacant state with an x in its middle

to mark the place I was born into dying

surrounded by oil refinery towers with flames

like giant birthday candles you could never

get big enough to blow out. Before I was

they were, and before them, reptiles and mammals

died and rotted and were crushed into carbon

then coal, then oil in the earth

whose deep core held bigger burning.

My daddy labored here, at The Gulf,

Which meant oil refinery, but also

a distance he drowned in,

caged inside this high hurricane fence.

In steel-toed boots for forty-two years, he walked.

The gold hatpin he got at retirement

had four diamond chips

for a smile and two rubies like eyes,

and he passed it to me

because it was a holy relic

of suffering and sacrifice,

so I wanted it most.

He breathed in this chemical stink

some days sixteen hours or days on end

in a storm, and it perfumed his overalls.

The catalyst he pumped on the cracking unit

burst through with enormous pressure to break down

the black crude’s chemical bonds

into layers, into products,

and many ignorant men did twist the spigots

and unplug the clogs and keep it all

rivering so the buried pipes

could carry out so many flammables north—

North! Where books are written and read.

The sunset down here glows green and hard-washed

denim blue and the scalded pink of flesh.

II. Numbers: Poison Profundis

Row out in the bayou with a shovel.

Take a pistol case you cross a snake.

Some places they’ve dumped stuff.

Sink a shovel in mud a few inches

and comes seeping up

some liquid stench right out

of the earth bubbling

acid green . . . like they took needles

or serpent’s fangs and injected

the very ground with it.

They dumped it here off trucks

or buried it deep in barrels the stuff ate through.

The devil has his own cauldron

and this goop glows green as any girl’s

magic clay she keeps on her nightstand.

We live on a scab, that’s what I’m saying.

How much is that worth? Not spit, not the blood of those

boys dead now my brothers so young, Lord, wing them

away from this shithole.

III. Leviticus: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

No one had to announce it was deadly

more than a moccasin bite.

The dumbest guy here (picked from stiff competition)

knew he’d be extinguished soon, polluted.

The oil barons too smart to live here would

as soon snuff us out as look at us—

our spongy tumors, the scarlet growth

on the bird dog’s belly, the fistula

in the breast, the bowels, the hanging balls,

basal cell carcinoma burned off with a cigarette.

Three gas stations in this town now chemo centers so

you needn’t drive to Houston

to sit with pollution needled into your arm,

while far-off bosses who knew all along

hit pocked balls off small hickory tees

towards named greens that go forever on.

IV. Exodus: Bolt Action

I left home to escape the swamp of self.

The locusts swarmed as in the days of Job.

Each wore a prophet’s face.

My mind was a charnel house and a death camp

and a mud pack body wrap in which you twist and steam

as every toxin leaches from your pores.

In every room of my home, the candles had been pinched dark,

the pages of the books wiped white of any word, and some

bacterium had begun to eat out everybody’s eyes

so yellow pus spilled from the lower lids like sick tears

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• The Organ Donor’s Driver’s License Has a Black Check
• Loony Bin Basketball
• The Burning Girl
• Illiterate Progenitor
• Read These
• Discomfort Food for the Unwhole
• The Devil’s Delusion
• Dear Oklahoma Teen Smashed on Reservation Road
• The Age of Criticism
• Exurbia
• Lord, I Was Faithless
• Suicide’s Note: An Annual
• The Awakening (after Milosz)
• How God Speaks
• Face Down
• The Child Abuse Tour
• The Less Holy Bible
• Coda Toward the New New Covenant: Death Sentence
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Mary Karr
• Copyright
• About the Publisher