Tropic of Squalor: Poems
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A new volume of poetry from the New York Times bestselling and esteemed author of The Liarâs 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 numinousâthat 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 powerâillness, death, loveâs 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 youâre 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.
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Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liarsâ Club, Cherry, and Lit, as well as The Art of Memoir, also a New York Times bestseller. She received Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships for poetry and is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
