Have Ruin, Will Travel by Kara Dorris

In her moving collection of poems, Have Ruin, Will Travel, Kara Dorris offers us, with unflinching precision and imaginative grace, meditative narratives about the struggles of the human flesh—poems that refuse singularities of perspective and thereby open up their questioning, ever to consider the as-yet unconsidered, be it the beauty of ruin or the virtues and vices of restlessness and instinct.  The metaphorical brilliance here inheres not merely in the wit of analogy but in the insight that takes the author by surprise.  Such are poems whose authority resides in their lack of authoritative insistence, in the strength to see the redemptive without dismissal, the terror without despair.  A powerful book.

–Bruce Bond

What a fierce psalm of a book Kara Dorris has given with Have Ruin Will Travel; this is a book that is not afraid to ask the big questions—about love, about mortality, about the ruin and redemption of the body.  Mordant, witty, deadpan, lyric, the genius of this debut collection is in its radical juxtapositions—a journey by train across the great Russian Steppes, a friend, a mentor, who schools the speaker in the art of radical reinvention, while behind loom the Texas landscapes and family of her childhood, her experience of disability shared by a brother who fights to survive. Dorris writes: “I thought this lava, these tumors, would kill/— murder the lives that came after,/ but we sprout from ash.” I cannot remember the last time I read a collection so brave or beautiful.

–Sheila Black

In Have Ruin, Will Travel, Kara Dorris creates a potent chronicle of two intertwined travels—one that spans Europe and Asia, and one that traverses memory and its territories of loss and regret. An awareness of ruin—of the speaker’s past, of her loved ones, of her own body—drives the poems toward escape and then tags along, an unshakable companion. Torn between the poles of “running away & wishing,” these meditations are heartbreaking but always alive with surprise, humor, and a restless urge for redemption.

–Corey Marks