Reasons for the Long Tu'm

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.