Mary Karr's "Sinners Welcome": Discomfort and Joy

A hand at your back gently pushes you out into your life: the image appears in poems that open and close Mary Karr's collection Sinners Welcome (New York: Harper Perennials, 2006). In between, the poems help us to feel both the stifling power of the boxes that encase us and the joy of escape.

Not having read Karr's trend-setting memoirs, I pieced together from different poems the narrative of a mother who grows up with her son. He's a nearly-mythical being, angel or god-baby, born in a hurricane, appearing "in a flash...a tiny blaze" as trees fell and power lines "snapped and hissed like cobras" ("A Blessing from My Sixteen Years' Son" 62). From a tiny "pearl" he grew to be a "muscled obelisk" now "pawing" through the refrigerator for a snack. She remembers his Mother's Day gift, an aquarium full of crickets singing "as if I were the sun / Which I was, I guess, to him, / and him to me" ("Pluck" 29-30). In his room after he's gone to college, she reflects,

If you've never been a kid, and choose to raise one, know
he'll wind up raising you. From whatever small drop
of care you start out with, he'll have to grow an ocean
and you a boat on which to sail from yourself
forever, else you'll both drown. ("Son's Room" 54)

In this poem, she calls her alcoholism a "sarcophagus" that "boxed" her in before his baby cries "ripped through the swaths of ether I hid in." Nearly twenty years pass in a line as "he grinned up and eventually down / to me from his towering height" and his breathing, his life, freed her from her "ribcage," her self.

A series of poems surtitled "Descending Theology" expresses the abstract doctrine of the Trinity in terms physical enough to make us squirm. The surtitle references the Nicene Creed, the Lord "came down from heaven."  In other places she refers to God's incarnation by that word's literal meaning "enfleshment," as when the crucified Christ, separated from his body, "ached for two hands made of meat / he could reach to the end of" (61). Her version of the familiar Christmas story is not for the squeamish:

But in the muted womb-world with its glutinous liquid
the child knew nothing
of its own fire....
He came out a sticky grub, flailing
the load of his own limbs...
("Descending Theology: The Nativity" 9)

The Trinity pervades her retelling of the Crucifixion. She spares no gruesome detail as she describes the nails, the sagging rib cage, the suffocation, wondering "if some less / than loving watcher / watches us." Then "under massed thunderheads" the man on the cross feels his soul "leak away, then surge" as "wind / sucks him into the light stream" and "he's snatched back, held close" (52). In Karr's imagination, the Resurrection is wholly physical, the word "Spirit" translated literally as "breath": "In the corpse's core," she writes, "the stone fist of his heart / began to bang on the stiff chest's door / and breath spilled back into that battered shape." She rounds out the Trinity with the assurance to us, "Now it's your limbs he longs to flow into... as warm water / shatters at birth...."

Being freed from an enclosed space (tomb, womb, room, rib cage) to draw in air is often part of the experience in this collection. She writes in "Overdue Pardon for Mother with Knife" that she now will "glorify the force that stayed" her mother's hand from using the knife on five-year-old Mary (59), and that an "aperture" opened in her heart "(not a dagger slot)" moving the child to "guzzle down breath like sweet spirits // as if a pillow just slid off my face" (60). A sullen juvenile delinquent whom the poet once tutored seemed a hopeless cause, though there's a hint of connection and regret when she writes to him "you ignored -- when I saw you wave at lunch -- my flinch," and she hopes that, in prison, "some organism drew your care," even if it was just a cockroach, or "some inmate / in a wheelchair whose steak you had to cut / since he lacked hands" so that the "stone" could "roll back" from the "tomb hole" in his heart (12). I stopped breathing as her lines drew me into the experience of a man falling through ice and being whipped by the current downstream, "numb lips pressed to the river's spine, to suck slid inches of air" ("The Ice Fisherman" 50).

These motifs mix with gratitude in her evocation of a live performance of Mozart's Piano concerto in "A Major" (16). She plays freely with language, as when she puns on a "corps" of players "in funeral dress" lining up around the piano that's like a "sarcophagus" as it contains, like an Egyptian tomb, "flocks of birds, banks of cirrus clouds, Egyptian forest groves." The "dread-locked," "lion-headed" soloist "strides" to the piano (Awadagin Pratt - I recognized him before I saw the dedication) - the orchestra's bows tilt "like the tiny masts of lifted sails," and the "piano's notes unknot / some inner ropes in me." When there's a "wave," we're thinking of nautical metaphors, but it's the "broad wave of the maestro's wand" that sets off the musical journey, "the notes skittering us along like surf." At the end of the concert, crying, she reflects "I never haven't breathed so long." In this poem, as in others, she has associated regimentation and order with cages and death, but this time she puns, "I've seen a death with order, meant but no way mean." The pianist has "sprung our sternums wide / and freed us from our numbered seats."

Other poems tell of the challenges and consolations of writing. "I came awake in kindergarten," she writes, "caged" in a desk "under the letter K," reflecting now that "in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid," its names and vows, and how, when she comes to "the valley of the shadow of blank," she can lean on her "spinal K," i.e., letters, "a strong bone in the crypt of flesh I am" (3). A harsh word in grad school from a celebrated teacher opened her "un-mascara'ed eye" to see the challenge of an "intricate" world "impossible // to transcribe on the small bare page" (15).  Recreating childhood observations of her family at home on an ordinary day, she tells how her-ten-year old self grabbed paper to write it down ("Still Memory" 65).

In this collection, gratitude is the emotion that comes across most, for an interested student who "knows what I know, or used to know" ("Winter Term's End" 34); for teachers and colleagues;  and for a once-fierce cat who, leaning into her for comfort at the end, leads her to pray, "Lord, before my own death,/let me learn from this animal's deep release into my arms" (47). There are poems of regret and some that made me cringe. Even with those, as she observes in her essay, "There's always joy in seeing how others see, even when it entails a stab of pain" (89).

In an afterword "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," Karr writes that learning to pray "thank you" was her entry into faith and out of addiction. Long before she believed in God, she'd felt the "awe" of poetry, how a poet far away in time and space could connect to her life. Now she aims to express joy in her work, though she admits "I still tend to be a gloomy and serotonin-challenged bitch" (90).

I like to think that those hands pushing gently at the open and close of the book are a sly suggestion of hands pressed together, framing the poetry as prayer.