Reasons for the Long Tu'm

Poetry. For her dazzling first book, poet Sara Cahill Marron took inspiration from two seemingly very disparate sources. The first, Marcel Duchamp's final painting, Tu'm (celebrating its centenary in the year this book appears), graces 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, looking forward, working within limitations, and breaking with convention. So is Marron's poetry. 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.