Scared Violent Like Horses

“I found Scared Violent Like Horses while browsing at Powell’s books in Portland, Oregon. I was in search of a collection of poems that would swallow me like a novel, carry me to the timeless dimension of literature. In other words, to be my balm in this fractured twenty-first century landscape. This book deeply satisfies … Direct from the heartland, John McCarthy speaks to all of us in a compassionate, whip-smart American voice.”

“In this devastating, gorgeous collection, John McCarthy opens up ‘[t]he hurt and mangled parts of us,’ the places in us where we are ‘hollering fervent and raw,’ to explore the pain of abandonment and the purity of that loneliness, so that we might understand how trauma breeds desolation. ‘How could we not / break the mirror we look at in the morning?’ How do we escape the desolation we are? ‘I carved my scalp open,’ he writes, ‘until I could feel the smoke leaving my body,’ and such viscerally brutal moments in this book remind us that ‘there are many different kinds of beauty.’ McCarthy is a master of transforming his world into every kind.”

“Scared Violent Like Horses is the story of a ‘lost boy with a quiet ache’—a story about a boy and a young man who grows up amid the landscape of a vast yet specific Midwest filled with switchgrass, scarecrows, dead leaves, dirt, factories, and family and childhood people. It’s the people the speaker is really writing about—the speaker’s connection and disconnection with those who populate the landscape and the feeling of being different or not fully belonging. Ultimately, what the reader is left with is a stunning overlap of lost boy and lost landscape glimpsed through the lens of a gifted poet’s magical linguistic and storytelling abilities.”

“Scared Violent Like Horses is a book that grabs the reader with its insistent lyric beauty. It’s a book where its speaker is haunted by the empty violence and despair of a Midwestern landscape full of “smolder and silence.” It’s a landscape usually underestimated and derided—the “flyover country” of condescending editorials and talk show chatter. But in the hands of this poet, these hardscrabble landscapes, these haunts of hurt and hurting families and friends who show love through their thrown punches—these scenes become so relentlessly beautiful that a reader cannot look away. John McCarthy’s poems have had their hold on me for a long time, and I defy anyone who reads this book not to walk away shaken, stirred, and ultimately, utterly changed.”

“Throbbing with the ‘quiet ache’ of the flown-over, John McCarthy’s extraordinary perception and lingual deftness unveil the grit and humble grandeur of Springfield’s north end. Rural Illinois’s emotional brutality is rendered raw as we see into and through a young man reaching beyond the debris of a violent and damaged lineage, in search of a gentler, less destructive self.”