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Sinners Welcome: Poems [Hardcover]

Mary Karr
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

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Book Description

February 28, 2006

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.


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Sinners Welcome: Poems + Lit: A Memoir (P.S.) + The Liars' Club: A Memoir
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of the memoirs The Liar's Club and Cherry began as a poet; this first collection of verse since 1995's Viper Rum alternates between a familiar, unsparing autobiographical vein and a new commitment to Christian belief. Karr, a recovering alcoholic and a temperamental skeptic, entered the Catholic church in 1996, and poems about God, Christ and Christian rituals may draw most readers' attention: "Disgraceland" describes "my first communion at 40," and tries to blend Karr's characteristic acerbity with her interest in religious compassion: "You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it." Some of the strongest of Karr's clean, direct free-verse efforts have less to do with religion than with her friends, children, parents, vexing early life. When she writes of "the winter Mother's ashes came in a Ziploc bag," fans of her prose will relate. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Mary Karr is a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays, and is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. Her previous two memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry, were New York Times bestsellers.


Product Details

  • Hardcover: 112 pages
  • Publisher: Harper; First Edition edition (February 28, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0060776544
  • ISBN-13: 978-0060776541
  • Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #119,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mary Karr's first memoir, The Liar's Club, kick-started a memoir revolution and won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, it rode high on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, becoming an annual "best book" there and for The New Yorker, People, and Time. Recently Entertainment Weekly rated it number four in the top one hundred books of the past twenty-five years. Her second memoir, Cherry, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, also hit bestseller and "notable book" lists at the New York Times and dozens of other papers nationwide. Her most recent book in this autobiographical series, Lit: A Memoir, is the story of her alcoholism, recovery, and conversion to Catholicism. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Award and Radcliffe's Bunting Fellowship. She is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.


Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
(17)
4.5 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
44 of 46 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing collection April 22, 2006
Format:Hardcover
Not since I was introduced to Wislawa Szymborska's writing have I found a collection of poetry that I not only wanted to read over and over and over again, but to memorize every word so that I could recite the poems to myself whenever I wished. Mary Karr's newest collection, SINNERS WELCOME, is a beautiful meditation on revelation in a world gone mad with abundance and self-interest. Karr seeks and finds the divine in the grittiest of objects and places - factory restrooms, a coat hangar, ashes sent to her in a plastic bag labeled "Mother, 1/2". Karr's poetry is a reminder that the sacred is everywhere, only hidden from view until we draw it out with our longing.

Concurrent shame and redemption is a recurring theme in this collection. The poet often writes of reaching out to the sacred just as she shrinks back from it, as in "Disgraceland":

"I found myself upright
in the instant, with a garden
inside my own ribs aflourish. There, the arbor leafs.
The vines push out plump grapes.
You are loved, someone said. Take that
and eat it."

Or, in one of my favorites - "For a Dying Tomcat Who's Relinquished His Fomer Hissing and Predatory Nature", in which the poet cradles her dying cat and finds an analogy between herself and the cat, and God and herself:

"It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way
I pray for: Lord, before my own death,
let me learn from this animal's deep release
into my arms. Let me cease to fear
the embrace that seeks to still me."

The waxing and waning of human relationships is another theme: the collection includes two beautiful requiems for deceased friends:"Metaphysique du mal", and "Elegy for a Rain Salesman", as well as a few poems on the theme of her son's birth, childhood, and departure for college. Whether she is talking of delinquents or dying cats, serial-killing football players or her alcoholic mother, Karr writes with a rare grace that will astonish the reader with its truth and beauty.

Her final essay "Facing Altars" is a beautiful explanation of and companion to her poetry. The essay is ostensibly about how she became a believer after being a confirmed agnostic for forty years by approaching prayer through poetry, and finding similarities between them: "With both prayer and poetry, we use elegance to exalt, but we also beg and grieve and tremble." She also outlines the next step in her literary project: to bring more joy to the poetry that she writes, and prove the maxim "Happiness writes white" wrong.

This collection suffers by two points. The first, I lay solely on the publisher: the jacket blurb, which opens "Mary Karr describes herself as a black-belt sinner . . ." and continues with "Not since St. Augustine wrote 'Give me chastity Lord - but not yet!' has anyone brought such smart assed hilarity to a conversion story." The "Catholic Girls Gone Wild" label that this blurb gives the book is misleading. First of all, if Karr is indeed a "black belt sinner", no evidence towards this label is presented in this collection. No sins she discusses reach anywhere past blue belt, unless you're the Jerry Fallwell type. Second of all, while some of the poems are funny, the collection is far too good to be demeaned by the label "smart-ass", which is something you would call a funny kid who talked back or a bawdy comedian. Janeane Garofalo is smart-ass. Mary Karr is not. It really irks me how much the publishing industry has sexed up their jacket blurbs to make things seem "hip" and "edgy". They usually end up just misleading and degrading the work they describe. They should stop.

The second point by which this collection suffers isn't in the poems themselves, either, but in the final essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer". The essay does a good job of explaining how an 'undiluted agnostic' could convert to Catholicism. It is personal and empathetic, and I really enjoyed it. My only problem with it is in the opening paragraph: "To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry -- the journal that first published some of the godless twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals -- feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO's 'Real Sex Extra.'

While publishing an essay on Karr's conversion through poetry in the same journal that T.S. Eliot published "Prufrock", the same poem that brought Karr to poetry, is fitting, or ironic, or something, it is not kinky in any definition of of the word kinky, and the "dildo-wielding dominatrix" line is so out of place in the context of her poetry and the rest of the essay, that it really threw me off of Karr's message in her final essay. If I didn't know that the essay had been published in _Poetry_ magazine before being published here, I would have thought that that opening paragraph was thrown in to justify the "smart-ass" description on the jacket blurb, and anyway had the effect of again, trying to sex up something that could have stood on its own merits.

This is a fantastic collection of poetry, and is highly recommended.
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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars She sees the light! May 2, 2006
Format:Hardcover
I picked up this book at a bookstore, because I remembered a couple of her poems I saw in the New Yorker, one was "The Choice" and the other was "Blessing from My Sixteen Year Son". Both I knew were wonderful poems, so I bought it. I've probably read this amazing book from cover to cover about 3-4 times already, and I've worked my way backwards, picking up all her earlier work. I've always been a huge Larkin fan and it's good to see the voice of angst again, but this time, unlike Larkin, there is hope for Karr, whereas Larkin dwelled in a world of desolation having never loved someone. This book is highly recommended, one of the few gems in contemporary poetry.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Bumping Into Spiritual Meaning May 5, 2006
Format:Hardcover
Mary Karr is an amazing poet, an amazing thinker who is able to distill her responses to the world as she finds it and opens a few windows into the world as she wants or thinks it should be. We need Mary Karr and others who write words like these wonderful poems. She reminds us that there is a sense of meaning if we seek it. And while it is a well known fact that Karr's journey from agnosticism to Catholicism is a head-scratcher at best, the poems in this her fourth anthology, are among her finest.

A good example is her poem 'Orders from the Invisible':

'Insert coin. Mind the gap. Do not disturb

hung from the doorknob of a hotel room,

where a man begged to die entwined in my arms.

He once wrote

he'd take the third rail in his teeth, which is how

loving him turned out.

The airport's glass world

glided me gone from him, and the sky I flew into

grew a pearly cataract through which God

lost sight of us. The moving wall

is nearing its end.'

Read it, and then with all of Karr's poems, pause, think, and read it again. This is a major poet with a unique voice that has much to tell us - if we are open to listening. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, May 06
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Review of "Sinners Welcome"
This is another fine product by Mary Karr, for lovers of Mary Karr's novels. Excellent and insightful writing. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Cynthia mudd
5.0 out of 5 stars Mary karr is always a winner
IF Mary Kare writes a book. I want to read it. Her writing is raw and real scraped from the depths of her being.
Published 3 months ago by Fredrika
3.0 out of 5 stars A Good Beginning
Unfortunately there are few poems in this book that deal with her religious beliefs. Those that do are thought- provoking and wonderful. Read more
Published 12 months ago by soteerwn
4.0 out of 5 stars totally worth it
This book is totally worth it, not just for the poetry, but also for the beautiful essay which concludes the book.
Published 14 months ago by English teacher
3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad.
Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome (Harper Collins, 2006)

Mary Karr's new book was marketed to me as poetry reflecting her conversion to Catholicism, which immediately set alarm... Read more
Published on October 10, 2008 by Robert P. Beveridge
5.0 out of 5 stars Karr as a religious poet
When it comes to Donne or the early Eliot, readers are drawn by the poet's edginess. Think about "The Relique" or "St. Narcissus. Read more
Published on March 19, 2007 by B. McAniff
5.0 out of 5 stars this is it
An absolutely wonderful book. I was moved to tears by many of the poems. If I could only own one book of poetry (thankfully that's never the case) this would be it. Read more
Published on February 16, 2007 by A. Echelberger
3.0 out of 5 stars love Mary Karr but not crazy about this book
It was too religious for me - but I will buy and read anything Mary Karr decides to write - she's amazing. If you haven't read the Liar's Club you need to read it immediately!
Published on January 3, 2007 by Amy Squires
5.0 out of 5 stars poet for our time
mary karr writes directly and poignantly about her life "of sin." Her return to a life of faith is described tenderly and clearly in the book. Read more
Published on November 9, 2006 by Patricia M. Coghlan
4.0 out of 5 stars A Poet's Conversion
In this short volume of confessional poetry, Mary Karr describes her difficult conversion from irreverence and agnosticism to Catholicism. Read more
Published on October 21, 2006 by Robin Friedman
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