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Scared Violent Like Horses: Poems
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 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 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.
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
104 pages, Paperback
First published March 19, 2019
5 people are currently reading
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About the author
John McCarthy
280 books16 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
November 28, 2019
These poems screwed my head back on straight after an unfortunate run of bad books. Everything seems to remind me of Larry Levis lately, but this book really resonates like his work. Most highly recommended.
September 30, 2021
Scared violent like horses is probably my favorite in the collection. Some truly haunting lines in that one.
I was too young to call him a friend, but I had a classmate once who snuck up /behind a horse and now his body is made of a long time ago. /He is the quiet space in my memory where he never sat next to me again.
I also enjoyed confirmation, love is like a horse set on fire from the inside, and guide and guard is far and near
I was too young to call him a friend, but I had a classmate once who snuck up /behind a horse and now his body is made of a long time ago. /He is the quiet space in my memory where he never sat next to me again.
I also enjoyed confirmation, love is like a horse set on fire from the inside, and guide and guard is far and near
January 11, 2020
I’ve spent most of my life in the Midwest … arguably speaking. I’ve been on the fringes — the Appalachian part of Ohio and southern Missouri, both sort of liminal spaces within the region, but also northwestern Ohio, right there in America’s bread basket, if you’re willing to count Ohio as part of the Midwest. (It’s got to start somewhere, right?)
Anyway, when you look at something from the edges, you probably get a better idea of what it’s all about, so I think I have a pretty good bead on the Midwest — and John McCarthy definitely deserves some overalls, a pickup truck, and a piece of hay to chew on, because he’s the real deal.
Of course, the real Midwest can be a pretty cosmopolitan place. You can eat at 25 different Michelin-starred restaurants in the Windy City alone, if you’re so inclined, and thoroughly modern industry and culture throughout the region.
But in Scared Violent Like Horses, McCarthy writes about Springfield, Illinois, and the honest-to-goodness corn country surrounding it. He proves his bona-fides by knowing the names of grain — zoysia, sedgegrass, corn, sunflowers, panicgrass, switchgrass, wheat, they all show up in this book, just as they do in central Illinois. Maybe they show up in L.A. as well, but it’s unlikely that most who observe it outside of farmland could identify it.
I have a positive impression of the Midwest, but McCarthy takes a darker view of it. Maybe it’s because cruel people and difficult situations inhabit the pages. The result is edgy sometimes, sad others, but it always feels like looking through a dirty window into a place we don’t usually get a glimpse of.
Some of McCarthy’s lush description is notable in the poem “Confirmation”:
[W]e used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light
where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust.
Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because life is the same
everyday, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing
but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge
that sounds like trying not to die but dies in smaller ways —
screen doors that slam shut but don’t shut all the way
because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky
boiling over with thunder and rain. …
As I write this, I’m actually sitting in the lower Midwest, and the sky is boiling over with … well, thundersleet. It’s winter, after all. Practically the same, though. I find the imagery here very accurate and evocative, and it’s this way on almost every page.
Here’s another glimpse of McCarthy’s specific imagery, from the title poem, “Scared Violent Like Horses”:
Back then, everyone I ever called a friend held fire in their fists
when they talked to me. Their fists were dingy, grime-covered, and grease-slick
as if they were made of horsehair, as if they were untamed and lonely,
galloping and wind-swollen. We didn’t know how to talk about loss …
I know that in the Emersonian sense, all people kind of experience the same feelings, no matter where they are: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.” So intellectually, I know that there’s nothing unique about the particular feeling young Midwesterners know — how they ache to escape, “fire in their fists,” “as if they were made of horsehair” (itching for more?), “untamed and lonely, / galloping and wind-swollen.” This is a violent poem, about a boy kicked dead by a horse, but it also punched me in the gut, because I remember what it was like to be young in the middle of nowhere. McCarthy’s writing is honest and accurate, and it takes me right back to where I started it all.
Anyway, when you look at something from the edges, you probably get a better idea of what it’s all about, so I think I have a pretty good bead on the Midwest — and John McCarthy definitely deserves some overalls, a pickup truck, and a piece of hay to chew on, because he’s the real deal.
Of course, the real Midwest can be a pretty cosmopolitan place. You can eat at 25 different Michelin-starred restaurants in the Windy City alone, if you’re so inclined, and thoroughly modern industry and culture throughout the region.
But in Scared Violent Like Horses, McCarthy writes about Springfield, Illinois, and the honest-to-goodness corn country surrounding it. He proves his bona-fides by knowing the names of grain — zoysia, sedgegrass, corn, sunflowers, panicgrass, switchgrass, wheat, they all show up in this book, just as they do in central Illinois. Maybe they show up in L.A. as well, but it’s unlikely that most who observe it outside of farmland could identify it.
I have a positive impression of the Midwest, but McCarthy takes a darker view of it. Maybe it’s because cruel people and difficult situations inhabit the pages. The result is edgy sometimes, sad others, but it always feels like looking through a dirty window into a place we don’t usually get a glimpse of.
Some of McCarthy’s lush description is notable in the poem “Confirmation”:
[W]e used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light
where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust.
Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because life is the same
everyday, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing
but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge
that sounds like trying not to die but dies in smaller ways —
screen doors that slam shut but don’t shut all the way
because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky
boiling over with thunder and rain. …
As I write this, I’m actually sitting in the lower Midwest, and the sky is boiling over with … well, thundersleet. It’s winter, after all. Practically the same, though. I find the imagery here very accurate and evocative, and it’s this way on almost every page.
Here’s another glimpse of McCarthy’s specific imagery, from the title poem, “Scared Violent Like Horses”:
Back then, everyone I ever called a friend held fire in their fists
when they talked to me. Their fists were dingy, grime-covered, and grease-slick
as if they were made of horsehair, as if they were untamed and lonely,
galloping and wind-swollen. We didn’t know how to talk about loss …
I know that in the Emersonian sense, all people kind of experience the same feelings, no matter where they are: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.” So intellectually, I know that there’s nothing unique about the particular feeling young Midwesterners know — how they ache to escape, “fire in their fists,” “as if they were made of horsehair” (itching for more?), “untamed and lonely, / galloping and wind-swollen.” This is a violent poem, about a boy kicked dead by a horse, but it also punched me in the gut, because I remember what it was like to be young in the middle of nowhere. McCarthy’s writing is honest and accurate, and it takes me right back to where I started it all.
January 2, 2025
the only child hums a song of loneliness and mourning
but he doesn't know that yet. He thinks only of how the song sounds
nice and matches the corn's swaying as he sits on the dge
of his tire swing, gripping the twisted triangle of rusted chain that twirls
and pinches his fingers, his legs dangling through the center of the tire.
The only child imagines this center to be the mouth of a very large slide
or a cave whose darkness is the entrance to some foreign and exotic place
where flowers without names unfurl toward him like handshakes.
But he is afraid to enter such dark tunnels alone. Everything is unknown,
and his humming grows louder as he spins faster and mistakes his dizziness
for permanence, and there is no one around him to tell him how still
and quiet the fields of Illinois really are. The semi-trucks speed through,
and their echoing whirs can be counted on like heartbeats.
When the only child falls off the swing and everything about him spins,
he believes every organ inside his body is a heart. All he does is throb.
-- "Portrait of the Only Child with Tire Swing"
Outside, mare's tail clouds run wild and smear the sky orange
at the end of a long day, and a hummingbird feeder hangs from the mulberry.
No one has come for me yet. Silence is just noise falling backward
from the future, and I don't know what to do with it.
I haven't lived through it yet. It's like wiping my eyes in the rain.
-- "Noise Falling Backward"
That night, the moon was as thin and yellow as a toenail clipping. Everything was quiet and free, and it taught me how to riven stillness out of any given place. No two spaces are alike, and it made sense when we pulled off at a rest stop. We sat on a bench, staring up at a passing plane. The lights on its wings flashed. The plane pulled the clouds over the moon like a stage curtain. They're just looking down, right here, calling us flyover country. He said it soft. He seemed like a person who had just been profoundly affected by the sudden return of an unfamiliar memory --
-- "Flyover Country"
How could we not
break the mirror we look at in the morning? How could we not swing
at the different version of our faces staring back between
the fissures? The hurt and mangled parts of us loved the blood dried brown
on our skewbald knuckles, and we had nightmares of being reined in.
We needed someone to help us change. We needed someone to force us
into confronting the uselessness of our violence.
But no one came, and our fists swelled unbridled and restless, wild and afraid.
-- "Scared Violent Like Horses"
Call us
storm-split trees. Call us every split husk folded open
to the light breaking through.
-- "The Decapitation of Paul Bunyan"
The body is a paycheck inside an envelope held up to the light.
-- "Definitions of Body"
Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye
-- "Confirmation"
we'd help each other up,
dust each other off, my friends and I, and talk about what it felt like
to shake someone's hand after they had spent a great deal of time
trying to hurt us. I have a lot of different names
for what to call that feeling. Sometimes mercy. Sometimes all of this
is necessary. Sometimes one day we will all be loved but not yet. Truth is,
I was never that skilled at slipping punches or finding angles
or pivoting out of the way. I just didn't want to be alone.
It was fun to stand there flat-footed
and let God answer in that hard way he likes to touch a body.
-- "On Fighting"
I wait for feeling to return. Which means my tongue
is a language preserved in a cave of ice, extinct for a time
and waiting for the thaw. Which means I'm waiting
for a reason to speak again, a reason to say if this isn't good enough
then I don't know what is -- the slight breeze while the pump
fills the tank. Which means maybe it is possible to come home
from nowhere. Which means I, too, can be a good person.
-- "Love Is Like a Horse Set on Fire from the Inside"
Did you know that a feral group of horses was once called a mob, too?
I had a mobile of horses when I was little that ran in circles and made music
above my crib. I guess everything we love turns violent -- even a group of horses
and the people we trust. But I'm alive in another life now, retelling
a version of it from a place of eminence, a softer world, where fear
and panic are reimagined as fog-dewed pastures reaching for the last pink
cloud of evening. And in 1999, when I say I stood there with a smear of blood
on my face watching the Y2K commercial leave the screen like blue smoke
lifting to a Budweiser commercial featuring Dalmatians and Clydesdales,
I mean I saw how everything was connected -- My father's hand. My jaw,
1999 and I wanted those Clydesdales to break free, become a mob and run away
as violent as my father's hand. I wanted them to turn into the mobs
that would break the windows at the end of the world. 1999 and I knew
there was a baby somewhere with his own mobile of piebald horses
making music, and that's all he would know of the world before it ended.
And all I know would be the taste of blood and smoke and music.
-- "Upon Learning That Years Later the World Did Not End, I was Finally Able to Talk about the Wild Horses"
but he doesn't know that yet. He thinks only of how the song sounds
nice and matches the corn's swaying as he sits on the dge
of his tire swing, gripping the twisted triangle of rusted chain that twirls
and pinches his fingers, his legs dangling through the center of the tire.
The only child imagines this center to be the mouth of a very large slide
or a cave whose darkness is the entrance to some foreign and exotic place
where flowers without names unfurl toward him like handshakes.
But he is afraid to enter such dark tunnels alone. Everything is unknown,
and his humming grows louder as he spins faster and mistakes his dizziness
for permanence, and there is no one around him to tell him how still
and quiet the fields of Illinois really are. The semi-trucks speed through,
and their echoing whirs can be counted on like heartbeats.
When the only child falls off the swing and everything about him spins,
he believes every organ inside his body is a heart. All he does is throb.
-- "Portrait of the Only Child with Tire Swing"
Outside, mare's tail clouds run wild and smear the sky orange
at the end of a long day, and a hummingbird feeder hangs from the mulberry.
No one has come for me yet. Silence is just noise falling backward
from the future, and I don't know what to do with it.
I haven't lived through it yet. It's like wiping my eyes in the rain.
-- "Noise Falling Backward"
That night, the moon was as thin and yellow as a toenail clipping. Everything was quiet and free, and it taught me how to riven stillness out of any given place. No two spaces are alike, and it made sense when we pulled off at a rest stop. We sat on a bench, staring up at a passing plane. The lights on its wings flashed. The plane pulled the clouds over the moon like a stage curtain. They're just looking down, right here, calling us flyover country. He said it soft. He seemed like a person who had just been profoundly affected by the sudden return of an unfamiliar memory --
-- "Flyover Country"
How could we not
break the mirror we look at in the morning? How could we not swing
at the different version of our faces staring back between
the fissures? The hurt and mangled parts of us loved the blood dried brown
on our skewbald knuckles, and we had nightmares of being reined in.
We needed someone to help us change. We needed someone to force us
into confronting the uselessness of our violence.
But no one came, and our fists swelled unbridled and restless, wild and afraid.
-- "Scared Violent Like Horses"
Call us
storm-split trees. Call us every split husk folded open
to the light breaking through.
-- "The Decapitation of Paul Bunyan"
The body is a paycheck inside an envelope held up to the light.
-- "Definitions of Body"
Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye
-- "Confirmation"
we'd help each other up,
dust each other off, my friends and I, and talk about what it felt like
to shake someone's hand after they had spent a great deal of time
trying to hurt us. I have a lot of different names
for what to call that feeling. Sometimes mercy. Sometimes all of this
is necessary. Sometimes one day we will all be loved but not yet. Truth is,
I was never that skilled at slipping punches or finding angles
or pivoting out of the way. I just didn't want to be alone.
It was fun to stand there flat-footed
and let God answer in that hard way he likes to touch a body.
-- "On Fighting"
I wait for feeling to return. Which means my tongue
is a language preserved in a cave of ice, extinct for a time
and waiting for the thaw. Which means I'm waiting
for a reason to speak again, a reason to say if this isn't good enough
then I don't know what is -- the slight breeze while the pump
fills the tank. Which means maybe it is possible to come home
from nowhere. Which means I, too, can be a good person.
-- "Love Is Like a Horse Set on Fire from the Inside"
Did you know that a feral group of horses was once called a mob, too?
I had a mobile of horses when I was little that ran in circles and made music
above my crib. I guess everything we love turns violent -- even a group of horses
and the people we trust. But I'm alive in another life now, retelling
a version of it from a place of eminence, a softer world, where fear
and panic are reimagined as fog-dewed pastures reaching for the last pink
cloud of evening. And in 1999, when I say I stood there with a smear of blood
on my face watching the Y2K commercial leave the screen like blue smoke
lifting to a Budweiser commercial featuring Dalmatians and Clydesdales,
I mean I saw how everything was connected -- My father's hand. My jaw,
1999 and I wanted those Clydesdales to break free, become a mob and run away
as violent as my father's hand. I wanted them to turn into the mobs
that would break the windows at the end of the world. 1999 and I knew
there was a baby somewhere with his own mobile of piebald horses
making music, and that's all he would know of the world before it ended.
And all I know would be the taste of blood and smoke and music.
-- "Upon Learning That Years Later the World Did Not End, I was Finally Able to Talk about the Wild Horses"
June 12, 2019
3 1/2 stars
August 23, 2021
This was beautiful, and it affected me enough that I read all the way to the acknowledgements section at the end of the book because I wanted another glimpse into McCarthy's life. I love how he's not afraid to be so lyrical and metaphorical and expansive in his depictions of nature and the people of the Midwest, but the description never ever once strays into the territory of being too sentimental or too flowery. After reading a lot of poetry that's full of short phrases and line breaks and is like, afraid to let go of that level of self-consciousness and awareness and just be a wash of raw feeling, this was that rush of raw feeling. I don't know anything about the Midwest, but even reading just a couple of these poems had me furiously googling photos of Springfield, Illinois to try and understand if the world I was picturing when I read the poems was the same as the world that McCarthy was actually writing about. I also love how he uses repetition—like a lot of repetition—and really build up to these sentences and images that sweep you off your feet. How the poems are sometimes full-on narratives, with plots and internal monologues and characters. And how specific they get. All of it comes from a place of memory. The aesthetic of the poetry reminds me of like, the nostalgia for a childhood you never had and the tragedy and longing for a mother of Sufjan Stevens with like, the sense of futility and brutality of a Richard Siken poem, except Midwestern, and more adult, more tender. I don't even know what I'm saying, this was amazing. I want to talk about my favorite lines but there are too many favorite lines.
"This is the year of this is never open. It's raining and it will not stop raining."
"Her voice is missing in the wind, and the stalks in the field run into each other in their panic..." "When the only child falls off a swing and everything above him spins, he believes every organ inside his body is a heart."
"I've been told not to come here—to this toolshed of memory, where everything is as old as it is useless."
"Silence is just noise falling backward from the future, and I don't know what to do with it. I haven't lived through it yet."
"My father squeezes his fork like a tired man growing into the patience that waits for him at the end of a long day and that has gone on for years in the direction of sorrow."
"That was the year we had buckets in the kitchen to catch water falling from a ceiling that thought it was the sky... That was the year I stepped on a nail and my father slapped me for the price of a tetanus shot... That was the year that was longer than a year in Springfield—gunshots—my father never speaking except to say enough."
Okay, I could go on forever like this. But I loved it.
"This is the year of this is never open. It's raining and it will not stop raining."
"Her voice is missing in the wind, and the stalks in the field run into each other in their panic..." "When the only child falls off a swing and everything above him spins, he believes every organ inside his body is a heart."
"I've been told not to come here—to this toolshed of memory, where everything is as old as it is useless."
"Silence is just noise falling backward from the future, and I don't know what to do with it. I haven't lived through it yet."
"My father squeezes his fork like a tired man growing into the patience that waits for him at the end of a long day and that has gone on for years in the direction of sorrow."
"That was the year we had buckets in the kitchen to catch water falling from a ceiling that thought it was the sky... That was the year I stepped on a nail and my father slapped me for the price of a tetanus shot... That was the year that was longer than a year in Springfield—gunshots—my father never speaking except to say enough."
Okay, I could go on forever like this. But I loved it.
August 7, 2019
Gorgeously stark and stunning collection of prose poetry that is at once mysterious, raw, and evocative.
Selected by Victoria Chang (Pushcart Prize among many other accolades), as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, John McCarthy's SCARED VIOLENT LIKE HORSES is an examination of growing up--of masculinity--but there's more. Buried beneath these complicated, yet tender words is a yearning. Maybe it's to be seen, to be heard, for greater compassion.
SCARED VIOLENT LIKE HORSES takes place in the Midwest--mostly Illinois--and this is something I completely 'got.' There's a working-class grit, but also a sentimentality, a deep attention to detail, a nostalgia for simpler things. This work, I am guessing, is deeply personal about drunk fathers and unwell mothers, it's about instability, and resilience, and isolation. And yet, it's inspiring.
I read SCARED VIOLET LIKE HORSES fairly quickly--a day or two--but it's not meant to be rushed. I want to go back and savor the pages, fall into the folds of these glimmering metaphors, revel in the observations. This work deserves that. McCarthy's tendency is storytelling--a narrative approach to poetry, and this is my favorite kind. I am enamored with the details, the texture, the way I was transported to a different kind of company, while simultaneously feeling inspired to write.
Simply put, I found this collection transformative and magical. I found some similarities between this and the fiction of Laura McHugh (THE WOLF WANTS IN, THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD, ARROWOOD), meets SOON THE LIGHT WILL BE PERFECT (Dave Patterson) but also maybe the work of John James (poetry).
Please join me in welcoming authors to my interview series at: www.leslielindsay.com|Always with a Book.
Special thanks to Milkweed Editions for this review copy. All thoughts are my own.
Selected by Victoria Chang (Pushcart Prize among many other accolades), as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, John McCarthy's SCARED VIOLENT LIKE HORSES is an examination of growing up--of masculinity--but there's more. Buried beneath these complicated, yet tender words is a yearning. Maybe it's to be seen, to be heard, for greater compassion.
SCARED VIOLENT LIKE HORSES takes place in the Midwest--mostly Illinois--and this is something I completely 'got.' There's a working-class grit, but also a sentimentality, a deep attention to detail, a nostalgia for simpler things. This work, I am guessing, is deeply personal about drunk fathers and unwell mothers, it's about instability, and resilience, and isolation. And yet, it's inspiring.
I read SCARED VIOLET LIKE HORSES fairly quickly--a day or two--but it's not meant to be rushed. I want to go back and savor the pages, fall into the folds of these glimmering metaphors, revel in the observations. This work deserves that. McCarthy's tendency is storytelling--a narrative approach to poetry, and this is my favorite kind. I am enamored with the details, the texture, the way I was transported to a different kind of company, while simultaneously feeling inspired to write.
Simply put, I found this collection transformative and magical. I found some similarities between this and the fiction of Laura McHugh (THE WOLF WANTS IN, THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD, ARROWOOD), meets SOON THE LIGHT WILL BE PERFECT (Dave Patterson) but also maybe the work of John James (poetry).
Please join me in welcoming authors to my interview series at: www.leslielindsay.com|Always with a Book.
Special thanks to Milkweed Editions for this review copy. All thoughts are my own.
April 23, 2019
I loved these poems right away: such simple language for such a complicated life. McCarthy thrives when characterizing the depopulation of the rural Midwest with "the loud dreams of fathers whose voices can still be heard, even seen", imagining the residents of a mental hospital "forgetting their lives one day at a time", or describing his own journey with "my tongue is a language preserved in a cave of ice". I easily made it through this gripping collection in one evening, even while reading each selection several times.
Yes, the themes of this book are fairly standard: isolation, closing factories, people fleeing to minimum-wage jobs or drunkenness, a childhood sacrificed to a parent's depression, and a turn to violence as a reaction. But McCarthy doesn't rest on these themes. His poetry is personal and universal.
I am most drawn to the poems where his story is somewhat hidden within mysterious and evocative lyricism. Other readers may prefer the poems where the narrative is more on the surface. Even these reward the reader with beautiful passages. His mentally ill mother was "wading into the deep water, vanishing from the feet up" and "Her skull was a bag of voices". He honors his father too, because the poet can "look into the landscape behind his eyes", thinking of him "pinned to clotheslines" and then have him "reach into a closet...and pull out a routinely painful, uniformed version of himself".
Yes, the themes of this book are fairly standard: isolation, closing factories, people fleeing to minimum-wage jobs or drunkenness, a childhood sacrificed to a parent's depression, and a turn to violence as a reaction. But McCarthy doesn't rest on these themes. His poetry is personal and universal.
I am most drawn to the poems where his story is somewhat hidden within mysterious and evocative lyricism. Other readers may prefer the poems where the narrative is more on the surface. Even these reward the reader with beautiful passages. His mentally ill mother was "wading into the deep water, vanishing from the feet up" and "Her skull was a bag of voices". He honors his father too, because the poet can "look into the landscape behind his eyes", thinking of him "pinned to clotheslines" and then have him "reach into a closet...and pull out a routinely painful, uniformed version of himself".
May 2, 2019
Wow, this collection is quite accomplished—which makes sense given it was published with Milkweed and selected by Victoria Chang. Most of the poems are in long lines of couplets but slight variations with this throughout. I liked that there was some variety of form but overall a uniform feel. My favorite poems in this collection are the ones about the speaker’s unwell mother. In “Hunger,” she “floats to her bedroom / where she sinks into bed like a dish to the bottom of the sink.” I think I would appreciate this simile in any poem, but it is especially apt here given the poem’s title and subject matter about the mother throwing away her son’s dinner before she even served it to him. McCarthy consistently writes very strong endings to his poems. I also loved the title poem, and its content is representative of the book’s main theme—how young boys’ fear/desperation turns to violence. And how there is also an intimacy in this.
February 25, 2023
3.5? Maybe 4.
I know I’m rating everything super high lately, but I’m just on a good reading streak.
Every line McCarthy writes is so beautiful, so dense with imagery, that you want to read it five more times— which is my favorite kind of poetry. McCarthy is one of those rare writers that can manipulate language in a way that feels fresh every time.
My only complaint—which is not really a complaint—is that, as Victoria Chang’s blurb on the back of the book states, McCarthy’s “impulse is narrative”. I found myself yearning for these vibrant images to become short stories. I almost felt that the poetic form was limiting what McCarthy has to say about the Midwest and his childhood.
So, if somehow John McCarthy is reading this, please write a book of short stories! Please! I will buy ten copies.
I know I’m rating everything super high lately, but I’m just on a good reading streak.
Every line McCarthy writes is so beautiful, so dense with imagery, that you want to read it five more times— which is my favorite kind of poetry. McCarthy is one of those rare writers that can manipulate language in a way that feels fresh every time.
My only complaint—which is not really a complaint—is that, as Victoria Chang’s blurb on the back of the book states, McCarthy’s “impulse is narrative”. I found myself yearning for these vibrant images to become short stories. I almost felt that the poetic form was limiting what McCarthy has to say about the Midwest and his childhood.
So, if somehow John McCarthy is reading this, please write a book of short stories! Please! I will buy ten copies.
November 11, 2023
"We didn't know how to talk about loss, so we made each other lose."
In Scared Violent Like Horses, John McCarthy plunges readers into the bleak rural landscape of hopeless poverty, illness, and addiction, a world where pain feels like living, "please is the color of a bruise," and terror breeds violence. To survive, you learn to take it and to inflict it because this is the only way you know how to relate and to cope.
McCarthy's poetic memoir illuminates the driving need of those who crave violence, those who react with their bodies, those who cannot see beyond "fists coiled tight as key rings" where "everything [they] love turns violent."
Please read this.
In Scared Violent Like Horses, John McCarthy plunges readers into the bleak rural landscape of hopeless poverty, illness, and addiction, a world where pain feels like living, "please is the color of a bruise," and terror breeds violence. To survive, you learn to take it and to inflict it because this is the only way you know how to relate and to cope.
McCarthy's poetic memoir illuminates the driving need of those who crave violence, those who react with their bodies, those who cannot see beyond "fists coiled tight as key rings" where "everything [they] love turns violent."
Please read this.
March 19, 2020
This is truly a splendid collection that I do not think received the attention it deserved on launch. It is musical, image-driven, and its narratives are riveting, heart-wrenching, real, and honest. McCarthy is finely tuned into human interaction and landscape, particularly the Midwestern landscape, in which these poems reside--festering and blooming in turn. These are poems of violence and heart. Of seeking and homewardness. Of longing, of the nameless longing that finds us all on empty roads driving forever. Oh, this is such a good book! Do read it!
December 18, 2021
I can't express how powerfully this book affected me. I got a chance to meet John McCarthy at An Inconvenient Hour and hear him read from the collection, and it was absolutely worth getting this collection from him. Scared Violent Like Horses is a tender, heart-wrenching exploration of masculinity, childhood, and growing up into a world that doesn't always feel like it wants you. I can't recommend it enough!
March 12, 2019
Scared Violent Like Horses cuts like a tornado through the psychic landscape of the Midwest. John McCarthy's poems poignantly depict a speaker alientated from himself: by toxic masculinity, by family strife, and by the rusted and wracked economy of the city he hails from. McCarthy is a first-rate storyteller and metaphor-maker.
April 2, 2023
“We didn’t know how to talk about loss so we made each other lose.”
“Such soft violence renders and yields this truth—each place is different in its silence, it’s upward reaching fields.”
“Silence is just noise falling backward from the future, and I don’t know what to do with it. I haven’t lived through it yet. It’s like wiping my eyes in the rain.”
“Such soft violence renders and yields this truth—each place is different in its silence, it’s upward reaching fields.”
“Silence is just noise falling backward from the future, and I don’t know what to do with it. I haven’t lived through it yet. It’s like wiping my eyes in the rain.”
August 7, 2023
John McCarthy's poems explore growing up in rural Illinois, absent parents, fistfights with friends, and flyover states, but mostly the act of seeing people with empathy and value. These are gorgeous and heart-rending poems that remind you how lyric can offer the comfort of a song, that poetry lets you sit in a space of experience not answers, and that you can endure so much hardship and still emerge with tenderness. John’s writing is thoughtful and vivid, graceful and grace-giving.
“Silence is just noise falling backward from the future, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“But I’m not sure why we would expect dreams to make sense, when our waking lives so often fail to observe narrative convention”
“No place is sad if you stay long enough”
“Silence is just noise falling backward from the future, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
“But I’m not sure why we would expect dreams to make sense, when our waking lives so often fail to observe narrative convention”
“No place is sad if you stay long enough”
January 10, 2025
A really beautifully visceral collection about growing up in rural Illinois. Some of the hyper-masculine violence between male children reminded me of my own childhood in Michigan. “Word Problem,” “Noise Falling Backward,” “Wild Vision of What Is Real” and the titular “Scared Violent Like Horses” were the biggest standouts to me personally.
May 3, 2024
blue sparks/twisted cinders/throbbing convulsions/switchgrass
i have been hurt the way a child can only be hurt by his mother/or falling from my lips, his father (the hard way that god likes to touch a body)
damn good book.
i have been hurt the way a child can only be hurt by his mother/or falling from my lips, his father (the hard way that god likes to touch a body)
damn good book.
July 28, 2024
“This town is not the memory I want, but I know how sadness works.”
A beautiful collection of poems about hands and home and how both can hurt. The writing was gorgeous, but some of the poems felt a bit repetitive.
A beautiful collection of poems about hands and home and how both can hurt. The writing was gorgeous, but some of the poems felt a bit repetitive.
February 18, 2021
Amazing poetry collection. Recommend highly
August 22, 2023
So much to love. And so midwestern. Whoot Peoria! Springfield!
June 11, 2024
really good
March 24, 2023
Light to decent 9
August 23, 2024
CONFIRMATION
You taught me how hands could be laid, how they could touch
a head and heal, but all of those hands eventually fell limp
like a field bent by threshing or a lit match dropped in water. Once,
we used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light
where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust.
Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because life is the same
everyday, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing
but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge
that sounds like trying not to die but always dies in smaller ways—
screen doors that slam shut but don’t shut all the way
because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky
boiling over with thunder and rain. I wake up now to the flashing
falling from the gutters and the water dripping through the holes
in the ceiling. All I do is recall your voice like a prayer thrashing
my skull that mines the night begging our fathers our fathers
our fathers in prayer, but they are off begging other women
in other towns. This town is not the memory I want, but I know
how sadness works. It’s like a kettle-bottom collapsing onto
the details of every thought. I shouldn’t have, but I stayed in town
to try and keep what I love alive, but no that never works. We were
a long time ago and a long time ago is too hard to get back.
The last time we talked you said, We will end up like our mothers—
waiting for nothing. Then you didn’t come back. No. Not ever.
You taught me how hands could be laid, how they could touch
a head and heal, but all of those hands eventually fell limp
like a field bent by threshing or a lit match dropped in water. Once,
we used to dance in The Corner Tavern’s neon light
where the pickup exhaust wafted inside like harvest dust.
Life in the Midwest is like one long goodbye because life is the same
everyday, and I didn’t realize you had left until there was nothing
but hard work and long days ending with the wind’s silent dirge
that sounds like trying not to die but always dies in smaller ways—
screen doors that slam shut but don’t shut all the way
because the house has settled and the roof is warping from the sky
boiling over with thunder and rain. I wake up now to the flashing
falling from the gutters and the water dripping through the holes
in the ceiling. All I do is recall your voice like a prayer thrashing
my skull that mines the night begging our fathers our fathers
our fathers in prayer, but they are off begging other women
in other towns. This town is not the memory I want, but I know
how sadness works. It’s like a kettle-bottom collapsing onto
the details of every thought. I shouldn’t have, but I stayed in town
to try and keep what I love alive, but no that never works. We were
a long time ago and a long time ago is too hard to get back.
The last time we talked you said, We will end up like our mothers—
waiting for nothing. Then you didn’t come back. No. Not ever.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews