Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Scared Violent Like Horses: Poems

Scared Violent Like Horses: Poems

McCarthy, John

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $16.00

ISBN10: 1571315071
ISBN13: 9781571315076
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: Mar 19 2019
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

Selected by Victoria Chang as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, John McCarthy's Scared Violent Like Horses is a deeply personal examination of violent masculinity, driven by a yearning for more compassionate ways of being.

McCarthy'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 pain carried down through generations and how quickly abandonment becomes a silent kind of violence; 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.

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