Reasons for the Long Tu'm - Poetry By Sara Cahill Marron
Publication Date: August 1, 2018
Paperback, 80 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-45-8
Available from Small Press Distribution
In this dazzling, dizzying first collection, poet Sara Cahill Marron draws inspiration from two seemingly very disparate sources. The first, Marcel Duchamp’s painting by that name (which celebrated its centenary in the year of this book's publication), appears on the book’s cover. Created as a site-specific commission, which explains its odd dimensions (thus one of the “reasons”), Duchamp incorporated references to much of his prior work, while pointing the way (literally) to his move beyond painting
(one interpretation of the title is a contraction for “you bore me”). It is, then, a work simultaneously about looking back and looking forward, working within limitations, and shattering them.
Her second inspiration is the rosary, the best-known western form of meditation and devotion. Through the strict, simple, repetitive structure of the rosary, with its circular “decades” of beads, the devotee is led to the contemplation of “mysteries” variously joyful, sorrowful, and glorious. And just so does Marron lead her readers spiraling through the contemplation of “big issues” in her three sections of ten parts each, from lyrical art through the lascivious mysteries of love and sex, to letters of loss and death and what remains. Heady stuff for a first-timer, but Marron more than delivers.
A third inspiration also deserves credit, as Marron thanks “all the drunks in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous who have lent me their stories and their recovery to whittle and meld with my own in the kiln of the Tu’m.” By taking on these many personae, she brings universality to her depiction of human experience, not always at it prettiest.
The result is a work of bracing originality, but in ways that Duchamp might have recognized. Marron’s use of repurposed email recalls his “readymades”, and both invite us to see a world we think we recognize, transformed, sometimes disturbingly so. She too strains against the limits of convention, adopting a frame but ripping through it.
She has her reasons. Let her show you.
Praise for Sara Cahill Marron & Reasons for the Long Tu’m
“Sara Marron writes a startling poetry for our disjointed times, one that moves beyond the clichéd and confining limits of poetry, but also optimizing poetry’s virtues on authentic voice, sound, and wisdom. She does not reduce the applicability of her work through topics tied to what we already know. Instead, she addresses our moment’s two sides of the same coin’s grave apocalyptic desperation and possibility. In her
identity position we can see ourselves.”
—Stephen Paul Miller, Ph.D., St. John’s University, New York
“It’s up to you to pick up these fingered intertextual voices, these rosaries of negative capability, within and flying out of a book so as to dwell in mysteries of poems unlike any other. Sara Marron plays the changes of a kind of sleep and wake talk, an efflorescence from her mind to yours As specific as / The Day Lady Died, /always remembering and spinning anew.”
—Lee Ann Brown, author of In the Laurels, Caught
“To read Sara Marron is to step into a world where there is ‘No shyness here. / Noshame here.’ This is an American lyric of the body and mind—a truly intelligent, unabashed celebration of words, letters and our relationships to one another.”
—Alison Palmer, author of The Need for Hiding
“Blunt closed sentences start these tumbling poems e.g. ‘The Fax Machine is Dead.’ Period, but then they tumble jazz-like, Mina-Loy like, music-like-referential-like. ‘Ayn Rand to pixels like’. Marron’s approach to the political shines in formal pirouettes, symbolic and honest, throughout these dancing strophes. An admiring and naïve whiteness bravely exposed, left sitting self-referential on a table of judgment (as whiteness ought to be judged); a queer sex bruise or many; ‘The East Village during the Ebola outbreak’. These poems sing and dance and hit the floor and strike the chord of beauty and even love, at the intervals in which love appears in this world.”
—Katy Bohinc, author of Dear Alain, Trinity Star Trinity, & Scorpio
Sara Cahill Marron is a Virginia-born poet and student of the law. Her poetry has been featured in various online and print poetry journals such as Dark Matter, Chagrin River Review, Gravel, The Write Launch, Foliate Oak, The Hamilton Stone Review, Joey and the Black Boots, and others. She holds a master’s degree in English from St. John’s University a juris doctorate at George Washington University Law School. In addition to writing and crafting words, Sara is a marathoner and a chess player, devoting less time to the practice than Duchamp did, but aspiring to the Mysticism of Blake in all endeavors. She is a friend of Bill W.