Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr

Sinners Welcome by Mary Karr

Mary Karr describes herself as a black-belt sinner, and this -- her fourth collection of poems --traces her improbable journey from the inferno of a tormented childhood into a resolutely irreverent Catholicism. Not since Saint Augustine wrote "Give me chastity, Lord -- but not yet!" has anyone brought such smart-assed hilarity to a conversion story.

Karr's battle is grounded in common loss (a bitter romance, friends' deaths, a teenage son's leaving home) as well as in elegies for a complicated mother. The poems disarm with the arresting humor familiar to readers of her memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry. An illuminating cycle of spiritual poems have roots in Karr's eight-month tutelage in Jesuit prayer practice, and as an afterword, her celebrated essay on faith weaves the tale of how the language of poetry, which relieved her suffering so young, eventually became the language of prayer. Those of us who fret that poetry denies consolation will find clear-eyed joy in this collection.

The Liars' Club, a New York Times bestseller for nearly a year, was named a best book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, People, and Time, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and received prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Karr has been a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry and has received the Whiting Award, Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and Pushcart Awards for both verse and essays. Her other best-selling novels include The Art of Memoir, Lit and Cherry, and Sinners Welcome, as well as Viper Rum, The Devil's Tour, and Abacus, a poetry collection. Karr lives in New York City and is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.