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    Sinners Welcome: Poems
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    Sinners Welcome: Poems
    Unavailable
    Sinners Welcome: Poems
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    Sinners Welcome: Poems

    By Mary Karr

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061877780
    Unavailable
    Sinners Welcome: Poems
    Author

    Mary Karr

    Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit, as well as The Art of Memoir, also a New York Times bestseller. She received Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships for poetry and is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

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    Reviews for Sinners Welcome

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    • 2/5
      Not really my type of poems. She's talented, and I liked some of them, but I did not feel them
    • 5/5
      Read some of this book out loud to my husband and the passages made me cry.
    • 4/5
      Two memoirs. One poetry book. One writing book. Yes, it was a Mary Karr week. My Mary Karr reading frenzy all started quite innocently. I took a writing class last summer at Inprint in Houston. Our teacher told us Mary Karr was coming to Houston in September. I spontaneously decided to buy a ticket, vaguely remembering that I'd read her first memoir, Liar's Club, back twenty years ago or so. When the date of Karr's reading approached, I was exhausted by all the beginning-of-the-year stuff we teachers experience but I remembered a book was included in the price of the reading, and I didn't want to miss out on picking up that book. So I reluctantly decided to go. When I googled the address of the reading, I was surprised to see that it was being held in a church. Must not have been able to book the Wortham for that night, I thought. I was wrong. It was no accident that Mary Karr was at Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal Church in downtown Houston, built in 1839; all her readings were being held in churches. I was intrigued. An author in a church. Imagine that. Mary Karr was fascinating. "I was a strange child," she told her audience at the reading. "I was not a happy child. But there was something about reading memoirs that made me feel less lonely." Karr shared her new book, The Art of Memoir, and suggested that through our stories we manufacture a self. "Writing a memoir is like knocking yourself out with your own fist," she told us. All her books, Karr explained, could be summed up: "I am sad. The end." In her life, Karr survived her alcoholic and dysfunctional parents to become an alcoholic and dysfunctional parent herself. And somehow she broke free of all that, mysteriously embracing both writing and the Catholic Church. Mary Karr is a little older, a little less functional Texas-rooted me. Like me, she has both the redneck-storytelling people and the salvation-through-reading people in her family tree. That was enough. I raced home from the reading and put everything I could find of Mary Karr's on hold at the library. I was amazed to find that not only were all three of her memoirs at the library, but that I could also check out and read one of her books of poetry. I'll just tell you that her books are mostly "I am sad." But, happily, there is a little more there before "The end." Beautiful writing. Sad stories. And redemption. Mary Karr.
    • 4/5
      A beautiful collection of poetry that is lyrical and thought provoking. The pieces cover different topics pertaining to our modern world and how we can find salvation in some of the most unlikely places because God really is everywhere - not just in the squeaky clean segments of life. The poetry is moving and the essay at the end completes the ideas and draws the book to a close neatly. This is one of those books that I think I will rate more highly the more times I read it. Well worth your time if you're a fan of poetry.
    • 4/5
      If the neon cross on the cover and the title hadn’t forewarned me the latest book of poems by the author of The Liar’s Club and Cherry, the large amount of traditional Christian religious imagery and subject matter would have come as bit of a surprise. Her memoirs of growing up in East Texas contain few references to religion and only a passing allusion to infrequent church visits with neighbors and a fight with girl who accused her (accurately) of saying that the pope dressed like a girl. Other than that there’s her flat statement on page 44 of The Liar’s Club, “We didn’t go to church.” So reading Sinners Welcome reminded me of the bits on Monty Python when John Cleese intones, “And now for something completely different.” If you are like me, you might want to start at the back of the book with the essay “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer,” which tells of her 1996 conversion, “after a lifetime of undiluted agnosticism.” The poems themselves are clear, as befits a poet that proclaimed herself, “Against Decoration,” but certainly not without vivid images and language. And although religious, they are certainly not pious, as witnessed by titles like, “Hypertrophied Football Star as Serial Killer,” “Hurt Hospital’s Best Suicide Jokes,” and ”At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave a Message.”