jason carney

[REVIEW] Starve the Vulture, by Jason Carney

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Kaylie Jones Books
300 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Amye Archer

 

When I first heard Jason Carney read in a small, sweaty room on the south side of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he read a story about pie, the kind his Mamaw made for him, and how one act of kindness by his Mamaw melted him into a million pieces. He cried. I cried. We all cried. This is the Jason Carney I know: the brilliant poet who can hold a crowd in the palms of his gentle hands, even in the most desolate of moments. But this is not the Jason Carney we meet in his new memoir, Starve the Vulture – not at first anyway.

Jason Carney was not born, he was built. Starve the Vulture, is the story of that process. A braided narrative takes us through three separate journeys: a bipolar childhood in which a young Jason bounced between an abusive father, a desperate, young mother, and the soft glow of his grandparent’s home; an adolescence fraught with violence, addiction and despair; and, finally, a single day – the day that would come to mark the end of Jason’s drug addiction. All three threads combine to create the three-dimensional world of an addict who would overcome a lifetime of emotional and physical brutality. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Year of No Mistakes, by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

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Write Bloody
108 pgs/$15.00

Review by Jason Carney

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s sixth book, The Year of No Mistakes, is a book of transitions. Movement is a strong thread throughout the most sophisticated offering this poet has made to date. Her voice is authentic and precise. The whole of the text seems as if not only the poems are in transition, but the poet as well, as if the narrator is searching for wholeness by leaving parts of herself behind.

The easiest transitional element to spot is the physical location of the poems. The reader is constantly moving page to page—Chicago, Brooklyn, Austin, Queens, and various cities in between. This movement seems natural and fluid, as if the book is piecing together the signs of her life, with the most important of these examinations being the relationships the narrator has developed and outgrown. The Year of No Mistakes is a book of remembrances and reflections, presented in a tangible and visceral manner, relevant to each of our lives. A clear example of this is the poem “The Bowery.”

We danced like ball bearings.
We laughed like ripped newspapers.
We smoked like backwards rain clouds.
We kissed like slammed doors. Continue reading →

Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah by Patricia Smith (A Review by Jason Carney)

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Coffee House Press

116 pgs/$16

 Patricia Smith’s newest collection, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, evokes a sense of history and self-awareness combined with precise storytelling and the most crafted verse. Each poem delves deeper into the mythology of her family, her childhood dreams, personal scars, small triumphs that create larger identity, and the emotions of growing up a southern transplant in a northern city. Mrs. Smith’s fifth book of poetry is on par with her past work, such as Blooddazzler (National Book Award Finalist). In her current incarnation, we find one of the most authentic voices of Modern American Poetry.

Poems such as “An All-Purpose Product”, “Baby of the Mistaken Hue”, “13 Ways of Looking at 13”, and “Laugh Your Troubles Away” all confront the emotional turmoil of being a black girl in the largest city in the American Midwest. These poems are valuable teaching tools for young people of all races; each poem with its own twist speaks to American White Privilege, more precisely, the scorn that imposes itself on anyone who cannot be assimilated. These lessons are presented in ways easily obtained and grasped by the reader through insightful personal pains of her first blossoming love as in “Open Letter To Joseph Peters Naras, Take 2.”

“I will throw you out of my house if I hear about you seeing/ that black girl again. Joe, I loved you then and love you/ still.”

Continue reading →