Selected by Victoria Chang as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, John Mc Carthy’s Scared Violent Like Horses is a deeply personal examination of violent masculinity, driven by a yearning for more compassionate ways of being.
Mc Carthy’s flyover country is populated by a family strangled by silence: a father drunk and mute in the passenger seat, a mother sinking into bed like a dish at the bottom of a sink, and a boy whose friends play punch-for-punch for fun. He shows us a boy struggling to understand “how we deny each other, daily, so many chances to care” and how “we didn’t know how to talk about loss, / so we made each other lose.” Constant throughout is the brutality of the Midwestern landscape that, like the people who inhabit it, turns out to be beautiful in its vulnerability: sedgegrass littered with plastic bags floating like ghosts, dilapidated houses with abandoned Fisher Price toys in the yard, and silos of dirt and rust under a sky that struggles to remember the ground below.
With arresting lyricism and humility, Scared Violent Like Horses attends to the insecurities that hide at the heart of what’s been turned harsh, offering a smoldering but redemptive and tender view of the lost, looked over, and forgotten.
İçerik tablosu
Contents
Switchgrass
I.
Hymn
Pie Tins behind Porch Lights
Portrait of the Only Child with Tire Swing
Self-Portrait as Stolen Bike
North End I
As If the Shirt Were Standing up Straight, Hand Raised
Hunger
Word Problem
Cremation
Noise Falling Backward
North End II
Callousing
Self-Portrait as Home Run Ball
The Scarecrow’s Reflection Is an Only Child
Bloodmeal
Little Ticks of Blood and the Taste of Dead Leaves
Until I Learn That Please Is the Color of a Bruise
North End III
Vandalism
II.
Flyover Country
I. [If You Stay Long Enough]
II. [Of Motherhood, a Fierce Drowning]
III. [Long Day of the Factory Belt]
IV. [The Taste of Copper]
V. [To Sever Anything]
VI. [To Riven Stillness]
VII. [Renders and Yields]
III.
Scared Violent Like Horses
The Decapitation of Paul Bunyan
Thin Napkins Sprinkled with Salt
North End IV
Last Rites
Self-Portrait as Psychiatric Ward
Definitions of Body
Our Mother Stolen in a Pothole
North End V
Baptism
Daguerreotype
Confirmation
North End VI
What I Mean When I Say I Don’t Box Anymore
A Brief History of Friends
On Fighting
Love is Like a Horse Set on Fire from the Inside
Wild Vision of What Is Real
Sometimes I Call the Damage Healing
And Other Acts of Mercy
Upon Learning That Years Later the World Did Not End,
I Was Finally Able to Talk about the Wild Horses
Guide and Guard Us Far and Near
Notes
Acknowledgments
Yazar hakkında
John Mc Carthy is the author of one previous collection, Ghost Country, which was named a Best Poetry Book of 2016 by the Chicago Review of Books. Mc Carthy is the 2016 winner of The Pinch Literary Award in Poetry, and his work has appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, Sycamore Review, Zone 3, and in anthologies such as New Poetry from the Midwest 2017. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and serves as an editor of RHINO magazine and the Quiddity international literary journal and public radio program.
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