“So much trickery has been got up to in religion's name that it's natural to get nervous when a writer starts talking about salvation, but Karr never tries to substitute faith for sound poetic practices. Reviewing the collection for the New York Times, David Kirby found in Karr a careful, tough religious poet: “Images rather than wishful abstractions abound,” Kirby noted. Sinners Welcome includes meditative poems on Karr’s recovery from alcoholism and her newfound, perhaps surprising, sense of faith. (from ‘The Blessed Mother Complains to the Lord Her God on the Abundance of Brokenness She Receives’)
Mine is the earhole their stories pierce.Ĭrisscrossed like barbed wire, like bandoliers. “Hers are the measured lamentations of a writer who will always side with the painful certitude over the wishful thought.”
“Avowedly unsentimental, Karr doesn’t overcompensate by striking exaggerated poses of disabused wisdom or affecting mandarin disdain for the muddle of human relations,” writes David Barber of Karr’s second book of poems, The Devil’s Tour. Yet despite the brutality of much of her subject matter, Karr’s work has received tremendous praise for its lyricism and beauty. Karr’s poetry and prose frequently include autobiographical elements, such as her hardscrabble childhood, teenage drug-use, failed marriage, and adult alcoholism, as well as her subsequent recovery and conversion to Catholicism. The author of several critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Abacus (1987 reprinted 2007), The Devil’s Tour (1993), Viper Rum (2001), and Sinners Welcome (2006), she is also the author of a trilogy of memoirs: The Liar’s Club (1995), Cherry (2001), and Lit (2009). Poet and memoirist Mary Karr was born in 1955 and raised in Texas.
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