Starve the Vulture

November 1, 2014
National Poetry Slam finalist Carney's memoir of his troubled upbringing, drug addiction and eventual grace.Addicts often refer to a moment of epiphany, when, at their lowest point, they experience a feeling of clarity that puts their disease into perspective. The author vividly describes his moment as a fortuitous brush with death, when, after bingeing on crack, he was driving with a prostitute and a car careened out of control, almost crashing into him at high speed. Dazed, Carney helped the other driver and noticed a crack pipe in his pocket. That man, tossed from his vehicle but seemingly unhurt, could have been him. So begins Carney's tale of redemption, which is told through time-traveling vignettes that alternate between his fraught childhood and adolescence and the manic, drug-addled events immediately leading to his moment of "grace." There is a sense of self-indulgence in Carney's recollections of his lurid self-destruction, but his memory serves to contrast the extremes of his depravity with a newfound meaning in life. If addicts need an excuse to justify their excess, Carney's list would probably dwarf most. Growing up, his family life was classically dysfunctional. He had a teenage mother and abusive father and teenage years of delinquency, homophobia and criminal apprenticeship. Behind all that, however, was a love of words and reading. Carney even fondly recalls his first encounter with poetry in which he smuggled a book out of the school library after checkout time had ended, later thinking after his first marriage ended after nine months, the "only relationship I believed I needed was with poetry." His dedication to poetry would lead him to four National Poetry Slam finals and speaking gigs at colleges to decry the types of bigotry and hate that had led him astray. Carney will easily win sympathy for his life, in which he has persevered to show others the hard work of his salvation.

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November 1, 2014
Carney has been a finalist in National Poetry Slam four times, was honored as a Legend of the Slam, and appeared on several seasons of HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. A gruff Texan who loves his mother, he performs his endearing poems with intensity and agility. For Carney, poetry is redemption, a way out of his rough life of contending with addictions of various kinds, homophobia, and racism. He recounts his journey to poetry and his work as an educator in this memoir, his first major piece of published writing, which opens in the midst of a storm of trouble escalated by a car crash. This is the moment I saw on the horizon my whole drugged out life. Carney follows a circuitous path to sobriety and sanity that includes his first poetry reading as well as interludes in drug dens, porn shops, and wild parties and, finally, stepping on stage in front of TV cameras. Sheepishly nave, jaunty, frank, and compelling, Carney shares his instructive story with generosity and insight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)