The Art of Bars by Mickey J. Corrigan
$14.99
A haunting meditation exalting the trashy to the sublime. Reading this collection, I was reminded of the Sanskrit neti neti, meaning not this, not this. A woman is searching the ashes of seedy nightlife for excitement, for love, for a home. Ultimately, she is negated through a series of humiliating trysts until nothing remains but woman eternal.
—Jade Bos, Hookers or Cake
Mickey J. Corrigan‘s best writing is about sluts in bars. I’m always interested to see the view from her eyes. She’s lived the life and it’s in her DNA.
—Steven Jay Flam, The Id and the Ecstasy
“It’s official. I am in love with Mickey J. Corrigan. Her writing style is all her own and I cannot get enough of it…There is no sugarcoating in a MJC book. Life is tough, but life is still good.”
—For the Love of Books and Alcohol
Mickey is a cynical optimist. I’ve known her all my life and I can tell you this: she finds the humor in all sorts of hell.
—Virginia Aronson, Tropical Diagnoses (Finishing Line Press)
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
Description
The Art of Bars
by Mickey J. Corrigan
$14.99, paper
Mickey J. Corrigan is a drunken reverie, a fluke of the imagination, an avatar who works as a pulp fiction writer, bar girl, and nonsense gatherer. She lives in South Florida, where the men run guns and the women run after them. War is constantly on everyone’s mind—personal wars, private wars, income generating wars. But so is love, with a chaser of anonymous sex. And drink, oh yes. Poetry is not. But then, it’s all just one big war-torn lovelorn drunken poem, isn’t it?
Mickey’s novellas and novels have been published by a variety of independent presses in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. In 2017, Salt Publishing in the UK will release her neo-noir crime novel Project XX.
Rose-Ann Bryda –
Mickey Corrigan’s The Art of Bars: Twelve Steps in the War Against the Self should be required reading for those in AA or any alcohol dependency treatment program. This collection of twelve plus poems is a raw look into the war of the conscious in battling addiction. Not just addiction to drinking alcohol but to the oblivion, deception, and destruction that comes with it.
War references fit comfortably with our woman’s inner dialogue. Warfare, enemy, attack, battle scarred, and the rounds keep coming as our woman carries on the dialogue with the self who wants out – to “avoid defeat” and the self that “may prefer drowning.” The self that is angry with herself and the one that says, “Go ahead. Drink to it.”
Written with the same artistry Corrigan brings to her prose. The reader can see, hear, and feel the desperation, the giving up, the vow to stop, and the lure of the drink’s ability to obscure and deceive. In the second poem, The Unexpected You, she tells us “Drunk: a way to make him look like the man you always wanted.” In A Slight of Hand, she refers to a man in the bar as “handsome after three drinks delightful after more.”
In To Avoid Defeat, Corrigan refers to the too short shorts she is wearing in the author photo on the back cover. In the same poem she refers to “Celtic ancestors” and “DNA calling you out.” Nothing is held back in the honest portrayal of being at war with yourself. One wonders how much of this life the author has lived.
Mickey Corrigan has given us a treasure. If you have never been at war with yourself, you can live vicariously through our woman and experience all of the reasons you do not want to go there. Or like most of us who have had at least a skirmish, she lets you know you are not alone and it could be worse. Who hasn’t had a moment when the lure to destruction overwhelms us “on the way to the gym, neon beckons you in. Again.”
Tim Bryant –
I first experienced Mickey J. Corrigan through her novel What I Did For Love. By “experienced”, I mean took part in the roller coaster ride that is Mickey’s unique style: blunt, confessional, funny, strange and smoothly delivered on the rocks and without a sissy cocktail umbrella. In my review of What I Did For Love, I descried the work as a “freaking TWISTED tale” about a sex addicted school teacher who marries the father to get to the son. So, yeah, Mickey’ll take you to Crazyville and back if you’re willing to get in the cab.
Maybe you already know this but at Pineapple Hill, the beach house I had built in a cow pasture in rural South Carolina, most of my reading happens in a hot tub with functional jets but no heat and with more than a few drops of rum. If you saw my review of What I Did For Love, you know also that within twenty minutes of cracking it open I was out of the tub pacing, reading bits of it aloud and saying things like “Holy freak!” and “What the f – – – !” to the bamboo, banana trees and loquat bush that support the artificial reef I call my tropical illusion.
Same goes for Mickey’s collection of poems The Art of Bars: Twelve Steps in the War Against the Self. First I was pacing again, reciting line to the banana trees, then I was speechless. In fact, for several days I tried improving on the description offered by Jade Bos, author of Hookers or Cake, on the back cover. Here’s what he wrote: “A haunting meditation exalting the trashy to the sublime. Reading this collection, I was reminded of the Sanskrit neti, neti , meaning not this, not this. A woman is searching the ashes of seedy nightlife for excitement, for love, for a home. Ultimately, she is negated through a series of humiliating trysts, until nothing remains but woman eternal.”
I wish I’d have thought of that before he did.
The collection opens with this quote from Shaka Zulu: “Never leave an enemy behind or it will rise again to fly at your throat.” Having once fought demons of my own—using a variety of mood and mind altering substances as counter measures—I fully appreciate this selection for setting the stage to The Art of Bars. In my case, the strategy was to throw as much at the problem—internal strife—as possible in hope something in the mix might kill the pain. And kill it good. But nothing ever did. Numbed it, yes. But kill it? No.
With the famous words of an African warrior king as her battle cry, Mickey J. Corrigan takes us into her sad world of attempted self-destruction.
The collection opens with a poem called To Avoid Defeat, a sort of threshold easing readers into the author’s mindset and a typical bar where that mindset is unleashed. If you have ever gone looking for yourself in a bottle, you’ll appreciate lines such as Know the enemy and know the self. In a hundred battles in you will not be defeated. In a hundred bars choose cunning over force and you will stumble out alive. And Ignore that man on the next stool, ignore his warm touch and the dark secret hole unspoken and shared.
Each poem take you further into the life of a woman looking for peace the hard way. In The Unexpected You, Corrigan writes Reflected in that liquid, glass, mirror behind the bar: a woman, drinking. The enemy waiting.
In A Sleight of Hand she says of herself: You’re growing older younger than your parents did.
I was gladdened by her poem To Drink or No at its beginning line: A new bar and you. I had thought the same once when expecting a different Happy Hour spot to something make a difference in my outlook. In this poem, Mickey keeps us honest by explaining that no place is ever different when you’re always the same inside yourself—unhappy, unimpressed and unsatisfied. She ends the poem writing, A man. Another bar another man. You do not stop the rounds from coming.
Of course there’s more. Lots. And it’s rich. And it’s hard-hitting. And somehow it’s fragile and tender too. In the end you wonder how Mickey got out alive. You wonder how anyone does. Then you wonder about the ones that are still are the barstool. That will never get out. Not alive.
Then late on night, perhaps in a hammock on a second floor porch, something in the air breezing through the bug screen will remind you of places and voices you left not even looking back at the half-finished Cuba Libre sweating on the bar beside a ten dollar tip. You’ll remember a woman even lonelier than you.
Read this collection of poems. Then get into Mickey’s novels. Start with What I Did for Love. As I did. Then move on to Tequila Dirty. As I am.