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.”
- ISBN10 0811212319
- ISBN13 9780811212311
- Publish Date 17 April 1993
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 30 September 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Format Paperback
- Pages 51
- Language English