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Collection of Poems
HarperCollins
March 2006
112 pages
ISBN: 0060776544
Hardcover
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Fiction Poetry
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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