Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Karr, Mary - Leslie Ullman (review date February 1999)

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Leslie Ullman (review date February 1999)

SOURCE: Ullman, Leslie. Review of Viper Rum, by Mary Karr. Poetry 173, no. 4 (February 1999): 314-16.

[In the following review, Ullman asserts that the poems in Karr's Viper Rum effectively address “the persistent and unanswerable questions of the human condition” through themes of family, religion, faith, and death.]

Mary Karr's third collection [Viper Rum] probes, without sentimentality or loss of vitality, autobiographical material she has handled in previous collections and in her celebrated memoir, The Liars' Club—a hard-drinking father whom she holds close ten years after his death, a once-volatile mother now subdued by disease and the ravages of too many party nights, and her own failed loves and difficult passage into and out of the realm of drink. The matrix from which her poems arise, even though many of them deal with places and people from the present,...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Mary Karr (essay date 1991)
   2. Cyra McFadden (review date 16 July 1995)
   3. Scott Donaldson (review date 23 July 1995)
   4. Gaby Wood (review date 19 October 1995)
   5. Elizabeth Young (review date 20 October 1995)
   6. Kate Hubbard (review date 4 November 1995)
   7. William Harmon (review date winter 1997)
   8. Elizabeth Powers (essay date June 1997)
   9. M. Joy Gorence (review date September 1997)
   10. Barbara Jordan (review date 1998)
   11. Judith Kitchen (essay date winter 1998)
   12. Robert McDowell (essay date winter 1999)
   13. Leslie Ullman (review date February 1999)
   14. Eric Murphy Selinger (essay date 2000)
   15. Sue Churchill (review date winter 2000)
   16. Mary Karr and Wendy Smith (interview date 2 October 2000)
   17. Liz Marlantes (review date 12 October 2000)
   18. Joyce Carol Oates (review date 2 November 2000)
   19. Valerie Sayers (review date 3 November 2000)
   20. Alix Kates Shulman (review date December 2000)
   21. Sanford Pinsker (essay date spring 2001)
   22. Jennie Bristow (review date 25 June 2001)
   23. Vicki Woods (review date 30 June 2001)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright