Tropic of Squalor: Poems. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2018. 96 pages. $22.99.
Mary Karr’s memoirs, The Liar’s Club, Cherry, and Lit, have earned her a place in the pantheon of letters with their unflinching look at family dysfunction, alcoholism, and Catholicism. The success of her memoirs has as much to do with Karr’s honesty as with the power of her downhome smart-aleck persona. In Tropic of Squalor, her first collection of poetry since Sinners Welcome in 2006, Karr wears down the rock of her sometimes indulgent wisecracking until she cracks open waters of God-saturated celebration. The result is a lyrical report from Karr’s personal pilgrimage as she dismantles her false self—both on the page and in her person—and encounters the holy.
In the collection’s second poem, Karr introduces a characteristic move: working through irony towards a pious mix of sympathy and praise. “The Organ Donor’s Driver’s License Has a Black Check” begins with a litany of apology for our daily mistreatment of animals: “Forgive me, black ant at the base of my yoga mat: / if the Buddhists are right, and you had a soul, / I’m a killer . . .,” then cheekily: “Forgive me juicy burger medium rare. I fell off the vegan wagon for want of you.” The speaker later recalls a walk with her heartsick friend, presumably the poet Dean Young, who tells a dying squirrel, “I honor your struggle, little brother.” The scene brims with such pity, for friend and animal alike, that you can’t help but imagine Young and Karr bursting bluesily into St. Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Son.”
Karr tends to lean hard on the sharp conviviality for which she earned such widespread admiration. In the poem “Lord, I Was Faithless,” for instance, a speaker expresses surprise at how long she lived without faith in spite of the literary fodder her past provides: “And I—whose chief grumble / Was my kidhood (whose torments / Did fill many profitable volumes) // refused your pedigree. . . .” Lines like these are frustrating for their cartoonish archaisms, and most lack the self-awareness of “profitable volumes.” Tics include “mine own” as in “mine own skull,” “mine own mind,” “ribbon around mine own throat.” Or worse: Karr’s tendency to encumber a simile with a folksy “as any” as in “as any turban,” “as any horizon,” or “as any girl’s magic.” Perhaps mine own ears did fill with ignorance as any bad reader.
Luckily, these habits can’t bear the weight of her spirit. With hard-earned insights into her own troubles, Karr packs Tropic of Squalor with powerful odes to the emotionally compromised. In “Loony Bin Basketball,” the speaker recounts a game of basketball organized by psych techs, “angels who set us running drills, at which / we sucked. . . .” During the hallucinatory game, she rhapsodizes her hospital-mates, including a surprising athlete: “Only Bill had game. / Catatonic Bill whose normal talent was to schlub / days in a tub chair. . . .” After gracing all present, Catatonic Bill sinks back to his glass-eyed ways:
He went back and
back into that shadowed stare. Lucky we were to breathe
his air. Breathe is God’s intent to keep us living. He was
the self I’d come inwanting to kill, and I left him there.
“Loony Bin Basketball” binds together not just Karr’s compassion for the marginalized, but the spiritual wisdom to which she herself clings: kill the ego before it kills you.
One person whose ego Karr scrutinizes like a lover spurned will be familiar to many readers. Many now know that David Foster Wallace entered Karr’s life at that fragile time when both began their recovery from addiction. They were soon romantic and the rest is literary gossip. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr scatters a trilogy of poems for Wallace, or so I presume again, as only one bears a dedication to him (“Read These”). Karr exhibits in these poems a capacity to contain in packed stanzas a rapid cycle of pity and bitterness.
“Read These” borrows from Wallace’s unfinished 2011 novel, The Pale King (“Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down / from the high dive. . . .”). Readers will suspect a distaste due to an ambition that may have contributed to Wallace’s suicide. He was, says the speaker, a man who “wanted web browsers to ping / his name in literary mention nonstop on the world wide web.” (Never mind the redundant “world wide web.”) Still, Karr’s indignation enthrones Wallace among the lethal canon of “genii:”
Read these,
did say the King, and put down his pen, hearing
himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest
aspects of the tax code
with the sharpest possible wit.
The tax code refers to The Pale King’s intention to bore readers with the tedium of the IRS to induce in nirvana in his readers, a notion Karr likely finds dubious.
But Karr is never without sympathy. Her keen understanding of depression is best expressed in the later two poems about Wallace’s suicide. Yes, Karr believes “every suicide’s an asshole,” but she is all too familiar with the agonizing self-justification that clamors in the hollows of a depressive: “. . . for you would not, could never / fully refute or justify the sad heft of your body, earn / your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen / you inherited. . . .”
For Karr, and for many people snatched from the hellfire of suicidal ideation and addiction, an appeal to God—whose mercy abounds in support groups and psychotropics—is the only solution. In “Face Down,” the last of the Wallace poems, the speaker wishes she could steer Wallace back to a light figured on a Christmas tree, a light which “still burns, like a star over a desert or atop / a tree in a living room where a son’s photos / have been laid face down for the holiday.”
Karr is most moving when she describes God’s communication. As a testament to the Ignatian spiritual exercises she underwent with Jesuits, the Catholic religious order whose prayer life emphasizes imagination, God’s voice is neither thunderous nor whimpering. Rather, God speaks “in sighs and inclinations.” Except when we get a God who says quite simply, “Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.”
In Tropic of Squalor’s final twenty-part sequence, “The Less Than Holy Bible,” Karr carries Whitman’s torch for sheer breadth of celebration and mourning. And whether in East Texas or New York, Karr is out to see God. And she finds God the moment “every black umbrella in Hell’s Kitchen opened on cue, everyone still moving” or in the bike messaging Christ riding “on battered mountain bike, green wings extended.”
On the whole, Tropic of Squalor is a call to escape the “charnel house and a death camp” of our own minds and love others, even if the best you can do is note that “[t]he pedestrians this day are not maggots on meat, / But dancers who weave and heft their packages.” Can Mary Karr get preachy? Yes. But these days, we could do worse than heed Karr’s cry to love “all the deodorized, the unloved all their lives . . . the oddest, the most perilously lonely.” Amen.
