McCarthy, John: Scared Violent Like Horses

Milkweed Editions (paperback, 2019) Publisher Marketing: 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 "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 rus