Sinners Welcome: Poems

A porn star lounges naked in her dingy apartment. A football star prefers his girlfriend drugged. A coat hanger transforms from a tool for torture to a halo. These are not the traditional images and characters that come to mind when one speaks of the literature of faith. Mary Karr's newest collection of poems, //Sinners Welcome//, possesses some of the flake and stink of a recently risen Lazarus. This is a good thing. Faith here is not a state of being but a process, and Karr takes us along with her on her very personal search for God. The above-mentioned poems are interspersed with a series entitled "Descending Theology." Other poems, with titles such as "Disgraceland," "Who the Meek Are Not," and "Pathetic Fallacy," continue the downward trajectory of Karr's work. In a similar vein, the essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," tells of a particularly despondent and faith-less time in her life. Her message seems to be that, in order to rise, we must first fall. And what a decadent, lyrical, and enjoyable fall it is. Reviewed by Katie Cappello

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. My knowledge of Mary Karr began with her memoirs (The Liar's Club and Cherry) , but one does not have to be familiar with her memoirs to appreciate Sinners Welcome.

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. I would describe it as a counter cultural behavior in our secular society

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

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 th