100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE
100 Notes on Violence
Omnidawn Press, 2023
100 Notes on Violence
Ahsahta Press, 2010
BACK IN PRINT, CARR’S POWERFUL POEMS SEEK OUT AND FACE VIOLENCE AND ITS COUNTERFORCES.
WINNER OF THE 2009 SAWTOOTH POETRY PRIZE
NAMED A TOP 5 POETRY BOOK OF 2010 BY LIBRARY JOURNAL
Julie Carr obsessively researches instances of intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs. She searches for what can be learned from the statistics, the statements by and about rapists and killers, the websites of hate groups, and the capacity for cruelty that lies within all of us. 100 Notes on Violence is a diary, a document, and a dream log of the violence that grips America and devastates so many. But Carr also offers a layered and lyric tribute to violence’s counterforces: love, commonality, and care. Her unflinching “notes” provoke our minds and burrow into our emotions, leading us to confront our fears and our own complicity.
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REVIEWS
"In this polyphonic poem the voices of care-givers, killers, and children co-mingle and, disturbingly, sometimes overlap. Innocence and guilt are never far apart. ‘At the pool the boy in cammies reads an encyclopedia of weapons.’ This book has great moral complexity, gravitas, and courage."
RAE ARMANTROUT, JUDGE OF THE 2009 SAWTOOTH POETRY PRIZE
"'The book about violence must be a book of quotations,’ according to Julie Carr in 100 Notes on Violence, ‘For everyone speaks about violence.’ Few have spoken or written on the subject with the desperate accuracy and the incendiary beauty of this disturbing, necessary book. Here, the quotations include statistics and news reports as well as the more traditional poetic forms, all to engage finally a light like that of the sun, ‘its daily resurrection, daily assault.'"
BIN RAMKE
“So what about words? Carr has built a “cupboard” of them (103). They seem least able to overcome or escape their subject when they are most moored to common usage and what we call “sense.” They are best able to make a way to an un-obliterating hour or world, when they’ve been marred, or played prestissimo, or translated back into barbarous sound.”
"Here is an Edmond Jabès of the slaughterhouse, one whose spatial reality surrounds us and duplicates itself ferociously. To think of these poems or notes or quotations as distillations of catharsis and containment would be to belittle the shock of semantic and ethical recognition to which Hill gestures and that this work expresses. However, the poems in 100 Notes on Violence exude in their compositional and de-composing characterizations a fealty to confronting contemporary human reality and allowing it to articulate its vehement drive toward destruction.
We are implicated and damaged, and we are not conscious of the snares in which we are caught ‘. . . for everyone’s life is riddled.’ These Notes do result in a stunning and remarkable ‘book of memories,’ reminding us that an alternative existence can be imagined."
JON CURLEY FOR GALATEA RESURRECTS #15
“Heavy with end rhyme: “feet like little suns// My brother drew a muscle then he drew a gun/ my envy turned me wild and my wild made me run,” the act of telling on ourselves, unburdening ourselves from the sins we carry, brings little relief in this poetic landscape. The music of this book is heavy, “I’ve loved your English so solo so done,” and parallels the weight of admission. We hardly feel that weight lifted. We hardly feel peace at all. So why read something so dark, so disturbing? It is beautiful… delicate… even graceful. Her language, the craft, and the way this work asks us to hold up a mirror as we read, is a journey of self-discovery worth taking. This book documents alcoholics, sexual predators, murderers, school shooters, unfit parents, and self-effacers. Carr gives them voice. In the first person, she speaks through them in interesting and dynamic ways. It is shockingly easy to get through 100 notes. To look into what’s secret. To uncover the taboo.”
“As Carr renders it, the issue of violence—real, historical, local—is both urgently pressing and maddeningly elusive. The book about violence is a book “’about’” violence because the attempt to write about vulnerability is itself always a risky business.”
DESALES HARRISON FOR THE VOLTA
“Part poem, part journalistic inquiry, part common sense, Carr manages to weave her sources and quotes into a carefully fractured narrative that is as beautiful as it is frightening.”
“A sprawling experimental poem in 100 parts, Carr's third collection variously examines the ways violence permeates our daily lives. Part personal reflection, part research project, Carr (Equivocal ) echoes writers and thinkers from Dickinson and Whitman to Bataille and Sontag.”
“While the sun cannot be seen through, it is not exactly opaque; if one could see past the blaze, the substance would reveal itself not as substance but agitated gas, flares and loops and roiling cataracts of light: an effect, not an object. Yet even if Carr’s silence about the common origins of common violence (a paradox she manifests beautifully) is like Perseus gazing into his mirrored shield to approach Medusa indirectly only to find himself struck to stone by his own reflection, his own intent, her necessary failure is clearly chosen and bravely made. She’s looked at the sun, and still sees.”
RAY MCDANIEL FOR THE CONSTANT CRITIC
“When Carr’s poems sit in their own terrified piss, it isn’t for comfort, as Corman’s child does, but because they want to articulate the world through experience of violence. They want to, and—childlike—they can’t. Their stuttering and their silences say the unsayable”
DANIEL CASEY FOR GENTLY READ LITERATURE
“Julie Carr’s 100 Notes on Violence is a collection that folds (and holds) the reader into its lyrical dread, and because of this, each poem has its own rise and fall individually.”
KELLY FORSYTHE