First line: “Any way I tell this story is a lie…
Devoured this on my recent trip home to Ohio. I underlined a lot of sentences. Here are a few:
- If I were a real poet, I’d be composing a sonnet about the fairy mist in yon oak.
- My mother taught me to seek external agents of transformation–pick a new town or man or job.
- …humming through me like a third rail was poetry, the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight, write myself into an existence that included the company of sacred misfit poets whose pages had kept me company as a kid. Showing up at a normal job was too hard.
- Count yourself lucky, she said. You’re still promising until your first book’s out.
- Where I come from, house guests have to know you’ve sweated over a stove, for sweat is how care is shown.
- I’d spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet–buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture–than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
- The whole city is so profoundly Caucasian.
- Every asshole I know has published a book.
- …a woman whose third eye has begun to stare at some invisible baby is incapable of dropping the subject.
- He tells me the story of a writer who–on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore–opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature about the note To Mum and Dad…
- I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
- How much smaller the large places are once we’re grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.
Recommended. Also of interest:
Karr’s Twitter feed: @marykarrlit
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