100 Notes on Violence (Sawtooth Poetry Prize: 2009)

Poetry. The 2009 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by Rae Armantrout, is Julie Carr’s provocative 100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE. Carr obsessively researches intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Whitman and Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs for answers. This book is a dream-document both of light and innocence–babies and the urge to protect them–and of giving in to a wrenching darkness, where despair lies in the very fact that no single factor is to blame.