(This, for instance, is the Karr version of a note from home: 'Lecia Karr's leprosy kicked in, and I had to wrap her limbs in balm and hyssop. Cherry finds the teenage Mary still marooned in a family whose behavior ranges from charmingly eccentric to dangerously crazy. Against all odds, its sequel doesn't disappoint. Her first memoir, The Liar's Club, was as searing a chronicle of family life as can be imagined-tough, funny, and crackling with sorrow and wit. Karr’s poems are thrilling in their vitality, dazzle, nerve, longing, and camouflaged depth.As a girl idling her way through long, toxically boring summer afternoons in Leechfield, Texas, Mary Karr dreamed up an unusual career for herself, 'to write one-half poetry and one-half autobiography.' She has since done both, and even when she's recounting a dirty joke, she can't help but employ a poet's precise and musical vision. “Know best for her bold memoirs, Karr brings the same scorching frankness to her vivid, kinetic lyrics. Scorched, palpable, sometimes pungent, sometimes brutal: Karr’s new collection is a mixture of tight narratives that end without resolution, hymns of unsettled suffering, and confused prayers.” ( The Millions) But whether you’re an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. The 'squalor' of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power-illness, death, love’s agonized disappointments.

In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous-that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to.

Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as her memoirs. Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes.

Cherry by mary karr