Mary Karr's poetry collection explores faith, memory, and recovery with the fierce honesty and dark humor that distinguished her memoirs. Karr, who converted to Catholicism after decades of addiction and wrote three memoirs about her Texas childhood and literary life, brings to poetry the same willingness to expose her own contradictions and yearnings. The poems move between prayer and profanity, devotion and doubt, depicting a faith that coexists with irreverence rather than demanding its suppression. Karr writes about her son, her failed marriages, her literary friendships, and her ongoing effort to live according to beliefs she cannot prove. Her formal range includes sonnets, free verse, and prose poems, with each form serving the particular needs of its content. The collection's title suggests the squalid territory she has always mined—the difficult childhoods, the addiction, the wreckage—while 'tropic' implies both climate and turning point. These poems show a writer who has passed through her crises without becoming sanctimonious about survival, who remains capable of anger and humor while also practicing gratitude and surrender. Readers familiar with Karr's memoirs will recognize her voice; those encountering her through poetry will find a different mode of the same sensibility—compressed, musical, working toward insights that prose might elaborate but cannot achieve in quite the same way.