Starve The Vulture
Jason Carney

One of the hardest things to do in a memoir is to turn a critical eye not just on your family or the world that made and betrayed you, but also on yourself. What you did with what you were given, and who you hurt along the way. And if you do overcome that hurdle, the trap waiting on the other side is just as treacherous: to not wallow in self-recrimination and hate, beating your chest and rending your shirt and demanding we all stare and agree that you are a horrible, horrible person.

Poet Jason Carney deftly sidesteps both of these genre-endemic problems to render his life in jagged, honest pieces, like bracing shots of whiskey. Jumping across several periods in his life, he turns his unflinching observer’s eye on his childhood trauma, and the way he re-enacted those traumas on the world as a young man - homophobia, racism, drug addiction, crime and violence.

The warm heart of the piece is his large extended family, and the refuge they provided for a young man who filled yellow legal pads with words because he needed to, not knowing or caring what they meant. To stop writing was to give in to death, a ledge he teeters on the edge of more than once.

Lyrical without being overblown, non-linear but still very satisfying, Starve The Vulture is a memoir that stays with you after the covers are closed. ( )

This memoir by Jason Carney is a very frank and at times disturbing recounting of his life. The story is both dark and encouraging as Carney pulls himself out of the depths of his despair.

The book is moving and powerful, and at times, difficult to read. Not because it is not well written, it is, but because of how horrifying a life Carney lived.

Mr. Carney is honest and frank about his past. He does not attempt to sugarcoat or cover up the ugly details.

As previously mentioned, the book is well written and almost reads like a novel.

This book is a great piece of work I highly recommend. ( )

Carney's memoir is a something that is lyrical and brisk, a something that announces itself loudly, and stands somewhere between poetry and memory, memoir and sculpture. There's a sort of inertia to the structure that makes it both more immediate and more extreme than either what you'd expect from fiction or memoir--in fact, I have to think of my reading experience in terms of a cohesive collection of poetry that draws you along, exhausts you, and forces you to keep going to see what comes next. Though poetry itself is a small part of this (though Carney does include four or five of his poems), Carney's carefully structured work--fragmented as it is--reads like an extended song or collection or poetry. As such, it's impossible to put down.

I'm positive, even as I write this, that the work may not satisfy the reader who searches out memoirs and expects certain guidelines to be met. Carney leaves holes open, jumps in time and jars the reader out of their expectations constantly, and leaves many questions un-answered. He doesn't self-analyze so much as you might expect, and you don't see every step on the path. You see pieces and fragments, points along the way, described beautifully in all of their occasional sweetness, horror, gore, and humor.

If you want an artful book, and a book that might re-arrange what you think a memoir is meant to accomplish, this is what you're looking for. And if you want a book which is simply a fast-moving, raw and touching read, then you're also looking for this one.

In other words, whether you read memoirs or not, whether you like or have any interest in reading about poets or not, you might very well find something to admire in this book. ( )

I really wanted to enjoy this book, and on some levels I did. Carney is a poetic writer; his sentences are lyrical and evocative.

But in the end, it's another how-I-overcame-addiction-with-God memoir, and the subject of the memoir, I am sad to say, is not very likable or sympathetic. When reading a story of how someone overcomes their challenges, I want to root for that person, but in this book, it wasn't so much that I wanted him to fail but that since I knew he would predictably overcome his addiction I wasn't really interested in how. It seems harsh to say that you don't like the main character in the book when the main character is the author, but I got the sense that the author didn't (doesn't?) really like himself either.

If I hadn't already read a ton of this type of book (author overcomes obstacle and confronts worst self), maybe it would have been okay. As I said above, the writing itself is lovely. I just didn't care for the subject. ( )

Not for the faint of heart, this book recounts the life of the author from child to adult in a series of short flashbacks. These are centered around a defining event that helped to change the forward path of Mr. Carney. The work is well written and the chapters tell of love and extreme damage that each, in turn, make the author who he is today. Interesting, Sad, Hopeful, Inspiring. ( )