A new volume of poetry from the New York Times bestselling and
esteemed author of The Liar's Club and Lit.
Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary
Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a
collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as
her memoirs. 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. 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.
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. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy,
laughter, and peace. She never preaches. 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.
