Mary Karr

Memoirist & Poet
Author of the Best-selling The Liars' Club

“You could say Karr is a poet who refuses to flinch, even if the landscape of memory and experience resembles a particularly gruesome Bosch canvas, and who, for the most part, refuses to be consoled by any comfort art or metaphysics might offer.” —Chicago Review

“One cannot help but cheer.” —Harvard Review

“Karr stares hard in the face of hard fact...These poems rip up the Hallmark card and replace it with the difficult, demanding claims of love in an imperfect world.” —Georgia Review

Spitfire, devotedly irreverent, and elegantly devastating are just some of the phrases to describe poet and memoirist Mary Karr. In person or on the page, Karr is undeniably distilled. Seeking “the poetry that made our pulses race, that could flood us with conviction and alter our lives,” she wrings from her reader sorrow, faith, and joy all enmeshed in the same beautifully brutal depictions of reality. Whether her poems filled with smart-assed hilarity or her unsparing prose, Karr captures a voice equal parts faith and cynicism and always moving.

Mary Karr's four volumes of poetry are Sinners Welcome (Harper Collins, 2006), Viper Rum (Pengui, 1998), The Devil's Tour (New Directions, 1993), and Abacus (Wesleyan, 1986). Karr's first memoir, The Liars`Club, won the PEN Martha Albrand Award for best first nonfiction and was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards. It was on The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and a "best book" for more than thirty newspapers and magazines. The sequel, Cherry, about her adolescence was also a bestseller for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Houston Chronicle. It was a "best book" for those periodicals and The New Yorker, where it was excerpted. Karr's two memoirs are credited with sparking the explosion in that genre. Her third memoir, Lit, is forthcoming in 2009.

Karr's poetry grants include The Whiting Writer's Award, an NEA, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. She has won prizes from Best American Poetry and Pushcart. Her work appears in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and Parnassus. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University as well as the weekly poetry editor for The Washington Post, a position canonized by Bob Hass and Ed Hirsch and Rita Dove. She lives in Syracuse and New York City.

"From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet’s burning taper touched some charred filament in my rib cage to set me alight."
—Mary Karr

 

About LIT (forthcoming fall 2009)
For more than fifteen years, fans of Mary Karr’s bestselling Liars' Club and Cherry have pondered how she survived her apocalyptic childhood and psychedelic adolescence. In edgy prose with Karr’s wicked humor, LIT details that saga. Mary Karr’s prizewinning Liars' Club chronicled her hardscrabble Texas childhood with enough sass and literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoir.  In Cherry, her psychedelic childhood and touching sexual coming-of-age also rode high on the bestseller lists. Here’s the sequel Mary Karr’s devoted fans have pined for—a self-professed blackbelt sinner’s descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness-and her astonishing resurrection. How did Mary Karr survive her hardscrabble, apocalyptic childhood and psychedelic adolescence? Lit chronicles that apocalyptic saga. Her longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, blueblood poet who can quote Shakespeare by the yard  produces a blond son they adore. But Karr can’t outrun her apocalyptic upbringing. As she drinks herself into the inferno that nearly devoured her mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A stint in the With an unlikely tribe of gurus and saviors—and a hair-raising stint in “The Mental Marriott”, Karr’s brought to an unlikely faith. A self-professed blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic, Karr converts to Catholicism.  Not since St. Augustine cried, “Give me chastity, Lord—but not yet!”  has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity.

About SINNERS WELCOME (2006)
Mary Karr made an improbable journey out of the inferno from her famously tormented childhood. In her fourth collection of poetry, she documents her transformation into a resolutely irreverent Catholic. The battle is grounded in common loss (a bitter romance, deaths of friends, a teenage son leaving home) as well as elegies for a complicated mother, but these poems disarm with an arresting humor familiar to fans of The Liars`Club and Cherry. They are illuminated by a cycle of spiritual poems rooted in Karr's eight-month tutelage in Jesuit prayer practice, and an essay that weaves together how Karr's reliance on poetry as a pathway out of suffering made prayer possible for an unbeliever. Readers who complain that poetry wallows in gall and denies us consolations will find clear-eyed joy in this collection.