<div>In this poetry collection, the author of Ghost Country deeply examines 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: sedge grass 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. Selected by Victoria Chang as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize Praise for Scared Violent Like Horses “McCarthy’s book of Midwestern threnodies begins in image and ends in solemnity . . . McCarthy’s poems are profluent stories?a joy to marvel at this skill, impressive considering the book’s bleak landscape.” —The Millions “McCarthy has whittled out a sense of freedom from the heartache of the past, and the reader is left with a remarkable vision.” —Booklist “In unshowy, plaintive, quietly delivered language that should not be mistaken for affectless?and that can be stabbed through with surprisingly piercing metaphor—McCarthy vivifies a place and hard way of life too little visited.” —Library Journal “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.” —Victoria Chang “A book that grabs the reader with its insistent lyric beauty.” —Allison Joseph</div>

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Scared Violent Like Horses

<div>Award-winning poet Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory is a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. For Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself. In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories. “Chang’s work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self.” —New York Times Book Review “Groundbreaking . . . Chang’s lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family’s time capsule and an artist’s timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem.” —NPR “Both a chronicling of [Chang’s] family’s history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home.” —TIME</div>

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Dear Memory

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Books By Victoria Chang (1 Book)

Dear Memory

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