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    Starve the Vulture: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    Starve the Vulture: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    Starve the Vulture: A Memoir
    Ebook322 pages4 hours

    Starve the Vulture: A Memoir

    By Jason Carney

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "Jaunty, frank, and compelling, Carney shares his instructive story with generosity and insight."
    --Booklist

    "Carney will easily win sympathy for his life, in which he has persevered to show others the hard work of his salvation."
    --Kirkus Reviews

    "Thanks to Carney's long career as a poet, there are some truly beautiful, enthralling passages that make the book a real page turner."
    --LitReactor

    "Carney weaves beautiful imagery into each scene, pulling the reader down the rabbit hole with him. His voice is raw and honest, similar to his poetic voice if you've had the good sense to have listened to him read before. With a deft hand, Carney takes what could be a kaleidoscope of agony, a narrative too hard to absorb, and softens each blow with his gentle prose."
    --PANK Magazine

    "It seems impossible to me that a reader could fail to be gripped by Carney's straightforward, vulnerable voice, which is able to imbue the harrowing events of his life with beauty, humor, and deep meaning."
    --Hippocampus Magazine

    "A story of tremendous courage and creativity in overcoming."
    --Poet Victoria

    "Before he was a sex-addict-crackhead-boozer-porn-salesman sliding downward in the Dallas demimonde, Jason Carney was a poet, a lowlife who prized his thesaurus as much as his speed pipe...He made it out, and Starve the Vulture tells how he did it, how poetic ecstasy trumped sordid pleasure. Brisk, electric, and moving, his story recalls both Baudelaire's Intimate Journals and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress."
    --J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life

    "While everyone with a pen claims to have been to hell and back, Jason Carney crafts his own harrowing perdition with a singular voice that is brash, unflinching, and eerily poetic."
    --Patricia Smith, author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

    "As Jason Carney takes himself from transgression to transcendence, he takes us with him. What starves the vulture will feed the reader."
    --Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive

    The latest from Akashic's Kaylie Jones Books imprint.

    A lyrical, mesmerizing debut from Jason Carney who overcomes his own racism, homophobia, drug addiction, and harrowing brushes with death to find redemption and unlikely fame on the national performance poetry circuit. Woven into Carney's path to recovery is a powerful family story, depicting the roots of prejudice and dysfunction through several generations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKaylie Jones Books
    Release dateDec 15, 2014
    ISBN9781617753381
    Unavailable
    Starve the Vulture: A Memoir
    Author

    Jason Carney

    Jason Carney is a UEFA/USSF qualified soccer coach. He has been involved in youth and professional sports for more than twenty-five years. He wants to help people understand what it takes to reach your dreams. He grew up in a working-class town in England and became a United States citizen in February 2019.

    Read more from Jason Carney

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    Reviews for Starve the Vulture

    4/5

    14 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Starve the Vulture: A Memoir by Jason CarneyThis book was difficult to read. The story was horrific. I'm glad he did not go into more detail, as it became clear the specifics of his personal living nightmare. Poetry is tasked with much to nurture and repair. I'm not sorry I read it, a story of tremendous courage and creativity in overcoming.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      7 of 75 for 2015. Reading Carney's Starve the Vulture is the literary equivalent of watching a train wreck in progress. Disturbing, horrifying even, yet you cannot pull your eyes away from what is happening before you. I found myself confronting my own prejudices--I really dislike white trash, and this book is full of that class of people. I cannot approve of the use of recreational drugs, even as I want that use decriminalized, and I have little to no sympathy for spousal or child abuse. Yet all of these make up the bulk of Carney's story. It is a credit to his skill with the English language, that he makes these horrors so readable. Told in a series of flashbacks, Starve the Vulture brings to light the process by which Carney confronts and comes to terms with his childhood. There are some stories I would like to have seen played out a bit further--was Mike safe when Carney got to the convenience store, for example--and I would have liked a more detailed explanation of how he overcame his own demons. The beginning/ending of the book, the car crash moment that he calls "Grace" seems a bit understated. Yes, he walks away from drugs, hookers, hoodlums. But he's hinted at doing that before. What has happened since 2007. I would like to know that as well. All things have to have a beginning and an end, so given the time frame explored in this memoir, I guess I'll have to accept what we've been given. An excellent read, and a compelling look into a life that most of us experience only through the news. Five stars.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Starve The VultureJason CarneyOne 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.