In Carry, author Toni Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America.
With a controlled voice like a Philip Glass composition, smooth, meandering yet repetitive, Jensen considers her troubled past and begins the work of stitching herself back together ... If reading this book feels at times like being on a train that doesn’t stop winding, Jensen does eventually settle into one of her themes most emphatically ... Using the right words to crystallize her outrage constitutes Jensen’s stance against an uncivilized country where violence can flare abruptly next door, or behind your own.
The scope and structure of Carry is remarkable. Episodic and recursive, it addresses a dizzying range of topics in its examination of both the 'everyday violence' and the 'extraordinary violence' that Americans so frequently see in the headlines ... Carry’s rapid movement among the personal, the historical, the political, and the social can at times be overwhelming, but it’s never unclear because Jensen anchors the reader in language ... The value of Carry lies in its unique structure, its sparse, powerful prose, and in the stinging perspective it provides on events that are numbingly common. Until we see it as clearly as Jensen does, the lens she offers on gun violence in America will be relevant again and again and again.
The string of onrushing questions is typical of Jensen’s rhetorical stance, which is urgent and occasionally scattershot. When she lands on a target, she does so effectively ... Mostly on point and sure to interest those opposed to a world of angry men and their guns, bulldozers, and writs.
