Poetry has become as important to me as any reading and contemplating I do.

Which is why I'm always eager to remind you about our ongoing initiative, The Poetry Radial Project.

It's a place where you can discover the poetry that so many of our guests fold into their lives.

And you can also delve deep into reading and listening to the many wonderful poets we've had on the show.

Check out one of my favorites, Marilyn Nelson Red for us, Love Song.

You'll also find Naomi Shehab-Nai, John O'Donohue, Lely Long Soldier, and many, many more.

All that at onbearing.org slash poetry.

Support for On Being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the

Spiritual Foundation for a loving world. Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding

principle and animating force for our lives. A powerful love that helps us live in sacred

relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world. Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. That's vintage Mary Carr,

the poet and writer of salty and lyrical memoirs like the Liars Club and Lit, in which she traces

her harrowing childhood in Southeast Texas, with a mother who once tried to kill her with the

butcher's knife and her own adult struggles with alcoholism and breakdown. Mary Carr is captivating

in writing and in person, for her ability to give in to what is funny and wild in life's most

heartbreaking moments. And she embodies this rhinos and wildness in her lesser known spiritual

practice as it devout Catholic and unexpected moves she made in midlife.

I started praying. I got on my knees. I mean, even I, you know, after whatever 35 years of

agnosticism, you know, when you land in a mental institution, you have to say to yourself, you know,

my ways of moving through the world are not succeeding. But I remember thinking at the time asking

this woman what she prayed for, she said, oh, I pray every day for a joyful day that's full of

...