Mary Karr, the author of the beautifully wrought, cry-and-laugh along memoirs The Liars’ Club and Cherry, is revisiting her poetic roots with a new book of poems. This time she takes on similarly autobiographical material: her experience getting sober and becoming an irreverent, doubtful, devoted Catholic.

Though I haven't gotten my hands on Sinners Welcome yet, the early reviews are good: “In these poems, with the frank authority and hard-earned wisdom of one who never expected to have faith, she simply invites readers to witness how it has transformed her, surprised her with the experience of gratitude and joy,” says the San Francisco Gate. But lest you miss her grit, “Don’t worry: Karr is the same plain-speaking, razor-witted writer she’s always been… [it] isn’t a book of well-mannered piety.” In the book’s afterward essay Karr “astutely and critically chronicles her conversion,” says the Gate. It sounds as though Karr is covering similar terrain as author Anne Lamott, a late-in-life Christian who also vacillates between pride and shame in her religion––which she too embraced while getting sober.

In an interview with the Berkeleyan, the California university’s paper, Karr, a Pushcart winner and Guggenheim Fellow, calls herself a “cafeteria Catholic” who is a pro-choice feminist, thinks priests should be able to marry, and that women should be able to become priests. Becoming a Catholic has transformed her “absolutely and not at all,” she tells the Berkeleyan. “Left to my own devices, I don’t think I’m a particularly nice person. I spend a lot of time in fear, and fear is the enemy of beauty and love.”

She’s mucking around in the fear once again while getting at the truth in her third pending memoir, Lit. She might do well to read her own words from “Disgraceland,” the poem that opens Sinners Welcome: “When my thirst got great enough/ to ask, a stream welled up inside;/ some jade wave buoyed me forward; /and 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.”

Photo by Marion Ettlinger