Sinners Welcome - Paperback

by Mary Karr (Author)

"What gives Sinners Welcome its sharp edge is the poet's eloquently passionate struggle at the junction of doubt and devotion." --Washington Post

From Mary Karr, the prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of The Liars' Club, Cherry and Lit, comes Sinners Welcome, her fourth collection of poetry that traces her improbable journey from a tormented childhood into a resolutely irreverent Catholicism.

With the same raw honesty that made her memoirs a phenomenon, these poems grapple with the sacred and the profane:

• Confessional Poetry: Unflinching verses that revisit a tormented Texas childhood and confront family trauma with Karr's signature dark humor and grace.
• Doubt and Devotion: A passionate, often-irreverent dialogue with God from a poet who wrestles with faith as fiercely as she embraces it.
• Addiction and Recovery: Honest poems that map the journey from the bottom of a bottle to the hard-won clarity of sobriety, finding grace in the most unexpected places.
• The Poetry of Prayer: An exploration of how verse becomes a form of prayer, and how a skeptical mind can find a home in the rituals and mysteries of the Catholic Church.

Back Jacket

In her fourth collection of poems, self-described black-belt sinner Mary Karr 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.