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The Devil's Tour
Book by Karr, Mary
- GenresPoetry
51 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1993
3 people are currently reading
563 people want to read
About the author
Mary Karr
27 books2,083 followersMary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
Karr was born January 16, 1955, in Groves, a small town in East Texas located in the Port Arthur region, known for its oil refineries and chemical plants, to J. P. and Charlie Marie (Moore) Karr. In her memoirs, Karr calls the town "Leechfield." Karr's father worked in an oil refinery while her mother was an amateur artist and business owner.
The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty, industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend, author Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.
She followed the book with another memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood. A third memoir, Lit, which she says details "my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in November 2009.
Karr thinks of herself first and foremost as a poet. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. Karr has published four volumes of poetry: Abacus (Wesleyan University Press, CT, 1987, in its New Poets series), The Devil's Tour (New Directions NY, 1993, an original TPB), Viper Rum (New Directions NY, 1998, an original TPB), and her new volume Sinners Welcome (HarperCollins, NY 2006). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly.
She is a controversial figure in the American poetry "establishment," thanks to her Pushcart-award winning essay, "Against Decoration," which was originally published in the quarterly review Parnassus (1991) and later reprinted in Viper Rum. In this essay Karr took a stand in favor of content over poetic style. She argued emotions need to be directly expressed, and clarity should be a watch-word: characters are too obscure, the presented physical world is often "foggy" (that is imprecise), references are "showy" (both non-germane and overused), metaphors over-shadow expected meaning, and techniques of language (polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives") only "slow a reader"'s understanding. Karr directly criticized well-known, well-connected, and award-winning poets such as James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, Vijay Seshadri, and Rosanna Warren (daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren). Karr favors controlled elegance to create transcendent poetic meaning out of not-quite-ordinary moments, presenting James Merrill's Charles on Fire as a successful example.
While some ornamentations Karr rails against are due to shifting taste, she believes much is due to the revolt against formalism which substituted sheer ornamentation for the discipline of meter. Karr notes Randall Jarrell said much the same thing, albeit more decorously, nearly fifty years ago. Her essay is meant to provide the technical detail to Jarrell's argument. As a result of this essay Karr earned a reputation for being both courageous and combative, a matured version of the BB-gun toting little hellion limned in The Liars' Club.
Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer", was originally published in Poetry (2005). Karr tells of moving from agnostic alcoholic to baptized Catholic of the decidedly "cafeteria" kind, yet one who prays twice daily with loud fervor from her "foxhole". In this essay Karr argues that poetry and prayer arise from the same sources within us.
Karr was born January 16, 1955, in Groves, a small town in East Texas located in the Port Arthur region, known for its oil refineries and chemical plants, to J. P. and Charlie Marie (Moore) Karr. In her memoirs, Karr calls the town "Leechfield." Karr's father worked in an oil refinery while her mother was an amateur artist and business owner.
The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty, industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend, author Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.
She followed the book with another memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood. A third memoir, Lit, which she says details "my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in November 2009.
Karr thinks of herself first and foremost as a poet. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. Karr has published four volumes of poetry: Abacus (Wesleyan University Press, CT, 1987, in its New Poets series), The Devil's Tour (New Directions NY, 1993, an original TPB), Viper Rum (New Directions NY, 1998, an original TPB), and her new volume Sinners Welcome (HarperCollins, NY 2006). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly.
She is a controversial figure in the American poetry "establishment," thanks to her Pushcart-award winning essay, "Against Decoration," which was originally published in the quarterly review Parnassus (1991) and later reprinted in Viper Rum. In this essay Karr took a stand in favor of content over poetic style. She argued emotions need to be directly expressed, and clarity should be a watch-word: characters are too obscure, the presented physical world is often "foggy" (that is imprecise), references are "showy" (both non-germane and overused), metaphors over-shadow expected meaning, and techniques of language (polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives") only "slow a reader"'s understanding. Karr directly criticized well-known, well-connected, and award-winning poets such as James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, Vijay Seshadri, and Rosanna Warren (daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren). Karr favors controlled elegance to create transcendent poetic meaning out of not-quite-ordinary moments, presenting James Merrill's Charles on Fire as a successful example.
While some ornamentations Karr rails against are due to shifting taste, she believes much is due to the revolt against formalism which substituted sheer ornamentation for the discipline of meter. Karr notes Randall Jarrell said much the same thing, albeit more decorously, nearly fifty years ago. Her essay is meant to provide the technical detail to Jarrell's argument. As a result of this essay Karr earned a reputation for being both courageous and combative, a matured version of the BB-gun toting little hellion limned in The Liars' Club.
Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer", was originally published in Poetry (2005). Karr tells of moving from agnostic alcoholic to baptized Catholic of the decidedly "cafeteria" kind, yet one who prays twice daily with loud fervor from her "foxhole". In this essay Karr argues that poetry and prayer arise from the same sources within us.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
July 21, 2021
Mary Karr's poems in The Devil's Tour are written in nutritious verse and with an assured style. She treats us to deeply personal poems about love and loss, divorce and her mother's blindness, her father's death and joys of motherhood. In return, we must wade through dense theological waters in other poems that I found opaque and – at times – downright difficult.
She writes of a fire-and-brimstone apocalypse on one page ("Then the creator peered down from his perch, as the wind of departing souls tore the hair of those remaining into wild coronas," [p. 18]) and then a few pages later writes evocatively of sensing her deceased father in, "vines that trail my shoulder like your hand, the cyprus a gnarled man," (p 39).
It's almost as if Karr's visceral and raw feelings and trauma flow out on one hand, while on the other hand she uses the labyrinth of religious allusions and imagery to intellectualize and somewhat obscure the feelings we just read about. While imperfect, the rhythm of alternating personal poems and religious poems is at play. Late in the collection, the personal and spiritual more noticeably cohere. Karr titles a poem about her young son "The Toddler as Cathedral" and writes, "how boldly he stands in his solid cathedral of bone," (p 45). The second to last poem, "Against Nature," tells of human triumph over nature and seems to eschew God ("Let god grow fat on the fruit of this rotting garden," [p. 49]).
There is also a prominent interplay of love and loss throughout the collection, specifically with parents and lovers. It does not go unnoticed that the collection is bookended with a poem about a teenage romance at the beginning and a poem about divorce at the end.
The Devil's Tour predates a lot in Karr's life that retrospectively informs the reading of these poems. Of course, we would learn much more about her origins in her seminal memoir The Liar's Club. She was ostensibly agnostic when this collection was published, but we know of her eventual conversion (re-conversion?) to Catholicism later in life, not to mention her persistent spiritual searching throughout her adult life (described in greater detail in books like D.T. Max's David Foster Wallace biography Every Love Story is a Ghost Story).
She writes of a fire-and-brimstone apocalypse on one page ("Then the creator peered down from his perch, as the wind of departing souls tore the hair of those remaining into wild coronas," [p. 18]) and then a few pages later writes evocatively of sensing her deceased father in, "vines that trail my shoulder like your hand, the cyprus a gnarled man," (p 39).
It's almost as if Karr's visceral and raw feelings and trauma flow out on one hand, while on the other hand she uses the labyrinth of religious allusions and imagery to intellectualize and somewhat obscure the feelings we just read about. While imperfect, the rhythm of alternating personal poems and religious poems is at play. Late in the collection, the personal and spiritual more noticeably cohere. Karr titles a poem about her young son "The Toddler as Cathedral" and writes, "how boldly he stands in his solid cathedral of bone," (p 45). The second to last poem, "Against Nature," tells of human triumph over nature and seems to eschew God ("Let god grow fat on the fruit of this rotting garden," [p. 49]).
There is also a prominent interplay of love and loss throughout the collection, specifically with parents and lovers. It does not go unnoticed that the collection is bookended with a poem about a teenage romance at the beginning and a poem about divorce at the end.
The Devil's Tour predates a lot in Karr's life that retrospectively informs the reading of these poems. Of course, we would learn much more about her origins in her seminal memoir The Liar's Club. She was ostensibly agnostic when this collection was published, but we know of her eventual conversion (re-conversion?) to Catholicism later in life, not to mention her persistent spiritual searching throughout her adult life (described in greater detail in books like D.T. Max's David Foster Wallace biography Every Love Story is a Ghost Story).
February 25, 2012
My favorite poem in this collection was "Average Torture:"
But less and less
you unlatch paradise.
You learn to sleep through days, standing
like a beast, sleep while turning pages
or crying out from love. You sleep
and sleep. One day you wake up dead.
Strange hands raise you from your bed.
The zipper's jagged teeth interlock
before your shining eyes. Small world.
They are not all so grim as this, although I think each poem has a bleak kernel that makes them wearing to read, although I wouldn't say Karr is flamboyantly unhappy or self-pitying. I get the impression, rather, that she's grit her teeth against all this.
I don't know much about her - she belongs to a circle of contemporary writers with which I'm not very connected or experienced.
But less and less
you unlatch paradise.
You learn to sleep through days, standing
like a beast, sleep while turning pages
or crying out from love. You sleep
and sleep. One day you wake up dead.
Strange hands raise you from your bed.
The zipper's jagged teeth interlock
before your shining eyes. Small world.
They are not all so grim as this, although I think each poem has a bleak kernel that makes them wearing to read, although I wouldn't say Karr is flamboyantly unhappy or self-pitying. I get the impression, rather, that she's grit her teeth against all this.
I don't know much about her - she belongs to a circle of contemporary writers with which I'm not very connected or experienced.
May 31, 2022
😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈😈
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.)
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.)
May 8, 2009
from Don Giovanni's Confessor
The Don withheld nothing, so at first
the old priest feared for his virtue,
which had never been tested
by the powdered flanks of a duchess,
but hearing the litanized names,
the priest soon learned what all whores
know: it was never a pleasure.
That ceased right away. Even the tenderest
stalk of flesh grows calloused with work.
The Don withheld nothing, so at first
the old priest feared for his virtue,
which had never been tested
by the powdered flanks of a duchess,
but hearing the litanized names,
the priest soon learned what all whores
know: it was never a pleasure.
That ceased right away. Even the tenderest
stalk of flesh grows calloused with work.
August 17, 2009
I'm working my way backward through Karr's published collections. I began with Sinners Welcome (2006), then picked up Viper Rum (1998), and now I've read The Devil's Tour, which was published in 1993. That leaves just 1987's Abacus. I suppose this officially makes Karr my favorite living poet.
January 6, 2010
Wow. Just. Wow. How a poetry book can, and should, grab you. Mary Karr yanks you in with the perfect words to create the perfect vision that sticks like glue. Her poems drip with emotional energy and sensuality. Each one of these poems left me feeling like I'd just discovered a new way to feel. Fantastic.
July 10, 2015
A slim volume of what the author herself refers to as "humanist poems" or as the blurb describes them "written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience -- poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood." Simple-seeming poems of life, death, a sick child, a lunch meeting, an affair. I thought these were really, really lovely. Beautifully written.
October 20, 2009
Poems about old boyfriends and literary crushes, loves, estrangements, and deaths, her family: her parents in their declining old age, elegies for her father, the joy of her child, the emptiness of divorce, and how the residents of the aquarium see us fill this insightful little volume.
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June 17, 2014I can't rate a book of poetry. I don't think it's fair. It's like giving hundreds of pieces of art in a museum one single rating. I did enjoy most of these, though. You ought to read it if you get a chance.
October 14, 2008
Wonderful collection of poems, my favorite being, Worm Farming, "...that thankless trade no one writes home about..."
September 20, 2025
This is my first experience reading Mary Karr, and it definitely didn't disappoint. While I didn't connect to some of the poems, others (like "Don Giovanni's Confessor" and "Parents Taking Shape") were some of the best poems I've read in a while. This collection is dark, sometimes upsetting. Nevertheless, I'll be keeping my copy of the book for another read through 😊
December 15, 2017
Mary Karr's poetry is a lot like her memoir -- beautifully written and often shocking. But, my favorite poem in this book is "Lunch," which is an island of something so calm and sweet and easy in sharp contrast to so much of the gritty reality elsewhere in the book.
May 25, 2017
I didn't enjoy it as much as Sinners Welcome, but there were a few poems that managed to stab me in the gut.
February 20, 2018
This collection of poems has reignited my love for the form. Mary Karr writes without pretentiousness; she is an unsentimental poet, always earnest and intense.
March 13, 2018
Strong poems. You can see growth since Abacus.
March 7, 2022
Pieces about anguish, despair, longing, pain. A handful of bright points, but nothing overwhelming.
November 25, 2022
her prose is better, but her stories are just as vivid in poems as in her memoirs
April 3, 2025
4+
Many of these poems read like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. But then again, life sometimes imitates art.
Many of these poems read like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. But then again, life sometimes imitates art.
September 9, 2024
There’s a certain genre bias in it but not much. Devil’s tour shows the verses of horrors in various guises, but not the kind any reader would expect. They’re not run-of-the-mill types. There are certain nightmarish moments to be sure, but there are moments of reality that creep in of ordinary life lived i.e. alcoholism, divorce, giving birth, possible abuse from the poet’s mother, and some rebellion against religion. This reader may be wrong in the interpretation of these poems but still recommended.
Read it again. Genre bias? Debatable. This harkens back to Dante. As well as some Milton. Still recommended.
Read it again. Genre bias? Debatable. This harkens back to Dante. As well as some Milton. Still recommended.
April 1, 2016
As much as I love Karr's prose writing, this collection of poetry (albeit her first) is at best uneven. And at worst...well, I got the impression over and over again that she was trying so hard to find the perfect metaphor that was a combination of concrete and oblique. While there were glimmers of truth, I couldn't help but feel, with the insight from Karr's recent The Art of Memoir in my brain, that many of these poems were her disowning her blue collar roots, trying to cover them up in graduate school trappings.
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February 17, 2011there is a poem where she listends to philip larkin talk on the radio about weaping, listening to wordsworth. then one night, she sneaks into the night bushes to watch philip larkin move past the glowing windows inside his home. and so it goes. one day i will join the great tradition of artist stalking by driving to upstate new york and stalking mary karr.
December 4, 2008
Somewhat self-involved, but what isn't? Beautiful, dark poetry coming from the heart.
August 12, 2016
How could we not fall for the line about the planets in our solar system : "sturdy bearings in their chutes".
April 7, 2017
66/100
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews