Nice collection of FIFTY uncommon items that feature original first printings of works by and about the teacher, poet, essayist, songwriter, and literary critic, Mary Karr. Most all in very good condition, a few with mailing labels (exceptions noted). All of the works by Karr cited below, unless otherwise noted, are printed for the first time. They include:
Moons and Lion Tailes: A Midwestern Journal of Poetry and Comment. Minneapolis, 1976. The 21 year-old Karr here prints one of her earliest poems, "For Aunt Gladys." She is noted here at this date as working as a poetry teacher at a "home for retarded women in Minneapolis." A very good complete issue with a little soil to wrappers. See photo #10. There's a photo of the 20 year-old Karr in the 2009 Paris Review (see below).
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20 Issues of Poetry (Chicago) spanning 36 years. Listed below in chronological order.
Poetry (Chicago) for June 1981. Features five new poems by the 26-year-old Karr, her first appearance of many in the notable monthly. Includes the first of her "Diogenes" poems, and several so-called "Paris" poems, works that Karr would later cite herself in print (1995) as examples of youthful "showing off, trying to create an intellectually sophisticated public self." Cover stamp to front and back wrapper, but no other markings. Now hard to find issue. Karr's first published collection of poems did not appear until 1987.
Poetry (Chicago) for July 1982. Five new poems in this number including "The Distance" and "Witnessing My Father's Will." Karr was at this date working for a computer company in Massachusetts. This issue is part of a bound volume of the monthly, April to September 1982. Gilt-stamped blue buckram Library binding is in very good condition. Stamps to covers (which are bound-in for each month) and title pages.
Poetry (Chicago) for June 1983. Five new poems here by Karr, including "Vigil," and "Diogenes Passes the Time," in an issue that notes, reprinting lines from his own work, the passing of Tennessee Williams and reviews the "Collected Poems" of Sylvia Plath and "Complete Poems" of Anne Sexton.
Poetry (Chicago) for November 1984. Karr here offers a new poem, "Diogenes Invents a Game." Part of a bound volume of the monthly, October 1984 to March 1985. Gilt-stamped blue buckram Library binding is in very good condition. Stamps to covers (which are bound-in for each month) and title pages.
Poetry (Chicago) for September 1986. Karr here contributes a new poem, "Soft Mask." This issue is part of a bound volume of the monthly, April to September 1986. Gilt-stamped blue buckram Library binding is in very good condition. Stamps to covers (which are bound-in for each month) and title pages.
Poetry (Chicago) for February 1987. Karr here offers a 9-page literary essay called "Sexual Poetics" following the publication of Alicia Suskin Ostriker's new anthology called "Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Woman's Poetry in America."
Poetry (Chicago) for May 1990. Includes Karr's new poem "Etching of the Plague Years."
Poetry (Chicago) for October 1990. Karr contributes the poem "Final Position."
Poetry (Chicago) for February 1992. Features Karr's new poem "Don Giovanni's Confessor."
Poetry (Chicago) for June 1994. This issue offers a review of Karr's second collection of poems, "The Devil's Tour" by David Barber.
Poetry (Chicago) for March 1998. Prints two new poems by Karr including "The Century's Worst Blizzard."
Poetry (Chicago) for February 2002. Features Karr's "Donna Giovanna's Laps." This issue has some highlighting and underlining to an unrelated review essay in the volume.
Poetry (Chicago) for January 2004. Offers Karr's poem "Disgraceland."
Poetry (Chicago) for June 2005. Includes Karr's "Revelations in the Key of K."
Poetry (Chicago) for November 2005. Important Karr issue features her 10-page narrative of her conversion to the Catholic faith, "Facing Alters: Poetry and Prayer." Of poetry, she says: "From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet's burning taper touched some charred filament in my rib cage to set me alight."
Poetry (Chicago) for January 2006. Includes two new poems by Karr, "Oratorio for the Unbecoming," and "Descending Theology: The Resurrection."
Poetry (Chicago) for September 2006. This number offers a review of Karr's new volume of poems, Sinners Welcome, by Dan Chiasson
Poetry (Chicago) for September 2012. This "100th Anniversary Issue" includes two new poems by Karr, "Read These" and "Suicide's Note: An Annual. " This last written in memory of her friend, and suicide four years earlier, writer David Foster Wallace. Late addition, not in photo. A like new copy.
Poetry (Chicago) for December 2012. This second "100th Anniversary Issue" features four new poems by Karr, including "Loony Bin Basketball" which she dedicates to her friend Coach Phil Jackson, "A Perfect Mess," and two others. This is the Special "Question and Answer" number and Karr here also offers four pages of prose explanations on the creation of each of her contributions to the issue. Late addition, not in photo. A very good copy.
Poetry (Chicago) for May 2017. This number offers a new poem by Karr, "The Burning Girl."
See photos #2 and #3 and #12.
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Ploughshares Volume 13, #4 for 1987. See photo #5. The 32-year-old Karr was at this date listed as the "Prose Editor" of Ploughshares and in this issue she offers both a new poem, "Sad Rite," and conducts an interview with British poet Craig Raine, whose work is featured in this "Special Poetry Issue," edited by the now late poet Bill Knott. This number also includes Erica Jong's new poem "The Land of Fuck." Wesleyan University Press had just published Karr's first collection of poems, "Abacus" at this time. 179-page issue.
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Ploughshares Volume 14, #4 for 1988. This complete issue is in very good condition and includes Karr's autobiographical musings in a poem called "Bad Family." This number is guest edited by poet Philip Levine, and Karr is one of the people thanked for the production of the issue. Late addition, not in photos.
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Parnassus: Poetry in Review for 1991 (Volume 16, #2). Thick, heavy 424-page issue, the best journal of poetical letters and criticism that we have in this country, here offers Karr's widely-discussed Pushcart Prize winning (23-page) literary essay called "Against Decoration," here first printed (an essay that Karr would herself reprint in her 1998 collection of poems called "Viper Rum"). This is a very good copy. See photo #3.
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TriQuarterly (Northwestern) for Spring/Summer 1992. Late addition, this is a very nice complete copy. Karr here pens a new poem, "The Legion."
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Parnassus: Poetry in Review for 1993 (Volume 18, #2 and Volume 19, #1). See photo #9. Thick, heavy volume features eight new poems by Karr, including "Memoirs of a Child Evangelist," "Accusing Message From Dead Father," and others, here first printed.
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Granta (London) for Summer 1993. This complete issue is in very good condition and offers Karr's 14-page excerpt "Grandma Moore's Cancer." This is noted here as Karr's "first published piece of prose." It was later published in book form as part of her memoir, "The Liar's Club" in 1995.
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Parnassus: Poetry in Review for 1995 (Volume 20, #1 &2). Twentieth Anniversary Issue. Features Karr's 11-page essay "A Memoirist's Apology." The essay appears here following the publication of her notable new volume "The Liars' Club." See photo #6. 476 pages. Thick and heavy.
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The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 19 January 1996. "SR" here pens a half column in review of the first English Edition, published by Picador, of Karr's The Liars' Club: A Memoir.
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Parnassus: Poetry in Review for 1996 (Volume 21, #1 & #2). An important issue that offers three new poems by Karr, here first printed, that include "Viper Rum," the title-poem to her 1998 collection of poems, "Four of the Horsemen (Hypertense and Stroke, Coronary Occlusion and Cerebral Insult), "The Wife of Jesus Speaks," and "County Fair." Late addition, not in photos above. A very good copy save for the lack of the back paper wrapper.
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The New Yorker for 26 February & 4 March 1996. See photo #11. A very good copy. Special Double "Women's Issue." Nice copy offers Karr's new poem, one with a twist, "Revenge of the Ex-Mistress."
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Parnassus: Poetry in Review for 1998 (Volume 23, #1 and #2). This issue of the journal features an essay by Karr headed "Remembering James Laughlin." This as part of a "Garland for [the late poet and editor] James Laughlin," who, in his later years, was both Karr's publisher and editor. She also contributes a poem to this number, Belongings.
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Parnassus: Poetry in Review for 2000 (Volume 24, #2). This number features Eric Murphy Selinger's essay in review of Karr's "The Liar's Club: A Memoir," and of her third volume of poetry, "Viper Rum." See photo #9.
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"Erotic Cheese and Crackers." This is an interview with Karr and Philadelphia National Public Radio host Terry Gross from 8 October 2000. Eight pages covering topics ranging from her East Texas upbringing and adolescence, to sex and religion, her parents, reading (it "saved my life"), favorite books, the method of her memoir writings, etc. Hard to find interview is reprinted in this 2004 collection of interviews by Gross called ""All I Did Was Ask." Hardcover first edition, published (353 pages) by Hyperion in New York, includes numerous other radio interviews over the years with artists, writers, actors, musicians, etc., including John Updike, Dustin Hoffman, Nicholas Cage, Gene Simmons, Mario Puzo, et al., and is in very good condition in a dust wrapper that has a little wear. See photo #10.
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The Texas Monthly for October 2000. This monthly nightmare of Texas "Culture" takes on Mary Karr's new memoir, Cherry. Penned here by some joker named Don Graham, who finds Karr's true life narrative of growing up in redneck Texas distasteful, as he does her "mainly invisible books of poetry" and the fact that she had the audacity to read poems and literary works, like, he says, the true hippie leftist that she is. This review essay, called "The Pits" (see photo #10) finds a place here in a monthly that had been singing the praises of the George Bush clan for decades and was at this date launching a campaign to promote one of the biggest morons ever into an American governorship, Rick Perry.
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The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 6 July 2001. Sheena Joughin pens a review headed "No Place Like Home" in review of the first English (Picador) edition of Karr's Cherry.
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Parnassus: Poetry in Review for 2001 (Volume 25, #1 &2). This number is also thick and heavy at 612 pages. It includes three new poems by Karr including "Groom," "Descending Theology: The Crucifixion," and "Descending Theology: The Nativity." See photo #6.
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Parnassus: Poetry in Review for 2003. 292-page number in very good condition offers Karr's new poem "A Major. "The poem details a performance by the formidably attired and dreadlocked concert pianist Awadagin Pratt and the poem is dedicated to him. Outstanding issue includes an important essay by Majorie Perloff on the Collected Poems of Robert Lowell; Latinist Charles Martin's new translation of a section of Ovid's Metamorphoses; Paul Muldoon on Marianne Moore; Karl Kirchwey on Anthony Hecht's Collected Later Poems and Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry, etc.
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The New Yorker for 30 June 2003. Karr contributes a new poem, "Still Memory."
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The New Yorker for 2 February 2004. Karr here pens a new poem, A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son.
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The New Yorker for 23 August 2004. This complete very good number features a new poem by Karr (reflections upon her mother) called "The Pathetic Fallacy."
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The New Yorker for 7 February 2005. Karr contributes a new poem, Last Love.
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Parnassus: Poetry in Review for 2006 (volume 29, Nos. 1 & 2). Karr here offers two new poems, Coat Hanger Bent into Halo, and Reference for Ex-Man's Next.
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The Paris Review for Fall 2006 (#178). Nice, very good copy offers Karr's new poem, here first printed, "Homo Perfectus Immaculately Conceives Himself."
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The Paris Review for Winter 2009 (#191). This is a very good copy that offers a 34-page interview with Karr (and Amanda Fortini) on "the Art of the Memoir." Includes some photos and a facsimile of one of her diary pages from age 10.
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The New York Review of Books for 25 February 2010. This issue features a longer essay by writer and PEN American Center President Francine Prose (with a caricature of Karr by David Levine and a drawing by Edward Gorey--see photos #7 and #8) called "A Knife at the Door" in review of Karr's new volume, "Lit: A Memoir." This is an item of some interest.
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The uncommon Writer's Chronicle for December 2012. See photos #1 and #4. 130-page issue is oversize and offers a lengthy interview, "Mary Karr's Journey through Darkness to Illumination" with Karr and Seattle writer and attorney Robin Lindley. This is another item of some interest. Includes an excerpt from her recent work, "Lit."
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THE NEW YORKER FOR 16 MAY 2016. Karr contributes a page of commentary in this number headed "High Maintenance." On the subject of high heels.
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THE NEW YORKER FOR 29 MAY 2017. Karr contributes a new poem, "Carnegie Hall Rush Seats."
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THE NEW YORKER FOR 20 JUNE 2022. Karr contributes a new poem, "O."
