Karr returns with her third account (after The Liar’s Club and Cherry) of her dark and drunken years as a newlywed and new mother, written to help her son get “the whole tale” of their early years together. Before she wrote memoirs, Karr was driven with a vagabond spirit toward poetry, whose origins she traces to the rural colloquialisms of her Texas roots. That poetic sensibility infuses every sentence of her story with an alliterative and symbolic energy, conjuring echoes of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and occasionally, Sylvia Plath. She even marries a fellow poet, a moneyed and controlling man named Warren. Unlike Plath, however, Karr’s impulse toward self-destruction originates more from the example set by her larger-than-life, emotionally