SOURCE: Kitchen, Judith. “Against.” Georgia Review 52, no. 4 (winter 1998): 755-72.

In the following essay, Kitchen contrasts Viper Rum with several recent poetry collections, asserting that Karr's verse stands up favorably to the literary values she presented in her critical essay “Against Decoration.”

For the past week, I've seemed—even to myself—to be against everything. Well, not quite everything, but a lot more than usual. I've been against little things: the way you can never—ever—get a real human on the phone when a company has voice mail; the people who don't like the color of the new lampposts where I work; the way the bank can't give me an answer because the computer is down; a student who told me to please print my comments on his papers because he can't read cursive. I've been against bigger things: the other side of the “argument” I've had with...