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.