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100 Notes on Violence
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.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 5, 2011
Perhaps, I was too excited about this book. I heard Carr read in Tucson, and found these notes mesmerizing, like I was overhearing an uncanny frequency. And the cover is dynamite. I had to turn this book facedown so the drowned child wouldn't stare at me. But the notes themselves didn't accumulate for me.
It's as though Carr has shattered a mirror and then sought to pick up the fragmented pieces and re-construct the mirror in new, strange ways. This impossible endeavor suits its impossible subject: to understand violence, especially its commonality.
But do these lyric fragments take enough shape? On a language level, I would say yes. The language was imbued with trauma, with words like wounds and with phrases truncated--as though the speaker were stopped mid-breath--and surrounded by a shocked, boundless, white space. But does the project succeed on a content level, ultimately? I'm not entirely sure. I wanted more fleshed-out meditation. My favorite pieces were the bulkiest. I also found the more concrete pieces--for example, the one with the student in her office who has burns on his hands--the most memorable and thought-provoking.
Compared to C.D. Wright's "One Big Self," for example, this book feels undeveloped and, for this reader, unsuccessful.
It's as though Carr has shattered a mirror and then sought to pick up the fragmented pieces and re-construct the mirror in new, strange ways. This impossible endeavor suits its impossible subject: to understand violence, especially its commonality.
But do these lyric fragments take enough shape? On a language level, I would say yes. The language was imbued with trauma, with words like wounds and with phrases truncated--as though the speaker were stopped mid-breath--and surrounded by a shocked, boundless, white space. But does the project succeed on a content level, ultimately? I'm not entirely sure. I wanted more fleshed-out meditation. My favorite pieces were the bulkiest. I also found the more concrete pieces--for example, the one with the student in her office who has burns on his hands--the most memorable and thought-provoking.
Compared to C.D. Wright's "One Big Self," for example, this book feels undeveloped and, for this reader, unsuccessful.
July 15, 2011
I really liked this one; it was also disturbing to read. So disturbing I can't find a poem I want to copy down (what I usually do with a book of poems). Maybe I'm not liking it as much on this day in April, when it's lovely and warm out and it feels abusive to read about children being hurt. And yet, some of these poems are very powerful. Perhaps my response is simply a response to that power. I'm not sure.
December 1, 2010
This book is so amazing I had to keep walking away from it, incredible depths mined and terrible spaces opened.
December 20, 2012
I'm into the model of the long poem as aphorism-essay, but this isn't my favorite example of the genre. It's still good though-- it's just that, reading it, I often found myself daydreaming about reading Juliana Spahr instead. Does that sound really mean? I hope not.
November 21, 2012
This is an important book for poets, and Carr is a writer to watch. She is smart, erudite, wise, thoughtful, careful, honest and gifted. It is, as Bin Ramke writes, "incendiary...."
June 20, 2014
Beautiful and terrifying.
January 30, 2025
What does it mean to write about violence? Is it to discover violence as it exists on the page? To reveal it to readers? To catalogue it? To remember what it’s like “remembering” that moment you’d rather not remember? Carr has many gestures to violence. Which I find to be one of her most effective means “noting” violence as a cultural presence. And how that cultural presence translates to personal presence. Where culture is defined as “everywhere.” Evident and not-as-evident. Witnessed and considered and hearsay and experienced. How is it someone experiences culture? What does it mean that woven deeply into American culture is violence.
And it’s this ambiguous implication of violence that stands as a greater threat than any explicit definition. Or it is more affective. Or terrifying. The violence revealed when your best friend describes being abused by his uncle, and the story of the abuse just keeps getting worse. But all you were doing when he told you about it was swinging on a swingset. The nature of Carr’s notes are like this. A self-conscious telling about violence, or an insinuation of violence, or the potential for violence. And Carr realizing her own book could be a source of violence by intentionally complicating the ways violence can be felt or revealed. A series of occasions for remarking on violence. An iteration of telling. It’s disturbing to read the book in 2025 and to remember the late 2000s with a violence we thought might finally go too far, would solidify a cultural tipping point. Maybe there could be enough school shootings, in particular, enough violence against women, enough predatory behavior, and people could think like the book thinks, in notes. And it would spell out an easy answer, then it would make clear easy answers don’t account for the complex presence of violence. And in 2025 there is this sense that even this understanding of violence still wasn’t enough. There won’t be a tipping point.
I’m personally fascinated with the thorough nature of Carr’s consideration. The book develops violence as a subject so broadly, and surprisingly, it’s hard for me to comment or review, here, anything outside the subject. She saddens the subject. She hopelesses the subject. She makes a reader feel what she feels when some new violent presence reveals itself to her. The scene where she and a neighbor are chatting on a porch while their kids run in and out of the house, then people appear on her lawn looking for a plastic bag that might be holding a three-year-old. A scene where a child sees a woman who’s been raped and stabbed running out of her house naked. Then she collapses on the sidewalk.
Carr consistently shapes the knowledge of violence. Which means she gives violence many shapes. Whether it’s a violence witnessed by her. Or it’s told to her by someone. Or the situation is related from a certain person’s perspective, and we, as readers, are set to both react at the violence itself and to experience that reaction through the person who’s witnessed it. Violence is not conceptual, or it is, but the concept looks different depending on how you’re looking at it. Whether you’re in the room. Or you’re in a room where someone’s telling you. Or you’re reading the poem, and the poem is now a room.
And it’s this ambiguous implication of violence that stands as a greater threat than any explicit definition. Or it is more affective. Or terrifying. The violence revealed when your best friend describes being abused by his uncle, and the story of the abuse just keeps getting worse. But all you were doing when he told you about it was swinging on a swingset. The nature of Carr’s notes are like this. A self-conscious telling about violence, or an insinuation of violence, or the potential for violence. And Carr realizing her own book could be a source of violence by intentionally complicating the ways violence can be felt or revealed. A series of occasions for remarking on violence. An iteration of telling. It’s disturbing to read the book in 2025 and to remember the late 2000s with a violence we thought might finally go too far, would solidify a cultural tipping point. Maybe there could be enough school shootings, in particular, enough violence against women, enough predatory behavior, and people could think like the book thinks, in notes. And it would spell out an easy answer, then it would make clear easy answers don’t account for the complex presence of violence. And in 2025 there is this sense that even this understanding of violence still wasn’t enough. There won’t be a tipping point.
I’m personally fascinated with the thorough nature of Carr’s consideration. The book develops violence as a subject so broadly, and surprisingly, it’s hard for me to comment or review, here, anything outside the subject. She saddens the subject. She hopelesses the subject. She makes a reader feel what she feels when some new violent presence reveals itself to her. The scene where she and a neighbor are chatting on a porch while their kids run in and out of the house, then people appear on her lawn looking for a plastic bag that might be holding a three-year-old. A scene where a child sees a woman who’s been raped and stabbed running out of her house naked. Then she collapses on the sidewalk.
Carr consistently shapes the knowledge of violence. Which means she gives violence many shapes. Whether it’s a violence witnessed by her. Or it’s told to her by someone. Or the situation is related from a certain person’s perspective, and we, as readers, are set to both react at the violence itself and to experience that reaction through the person who’s witnessed it. Violence is not conceptual, or it is, but the concept looks different depending on how you’re looking at it. Whether you’re in the room. Or you’re in a room where someone’s telling you. Or you’re reading the poem, and the poem is now a room.
October 8, 2025
first poetry book I’ve read all the way through. Difficult to swallow themes in jarring prose. Julie Carr is a poet who made a collection of work following the columbine shooting. There are many pieces about gun violence and it’s very sad to see how relevant her warnings and sadness are to this day.
November 14, 2017
4.5 stars
February 4, 2025
dazzling and nauseating! thank you for pulling me out of my reading slump julie carr, i look forward to reading everything you’ve ever written ever
August 31, 2011
I really wanted to like this collection (or is it a long single poem?), but it just fell flat for me in a lot of ways.
I felt that it was strongest in it's most concrete, narrative moments, (such as the two prose poems that make up section 42), but it strayed into the scattered wordplay so often that it undermined it's own statement. I am not ignorant of the postmodern forces at work here... I just question if they work.
If this book means to speak out against all violence, there are some strange anomalies. While a great majority of violent acts are perpetrated by men (a fact I am well aware of, please understand), the author seems intent on skewing the data even further that way. The poet brings up self mutilation through cutting only in a male character - a violent act which is heavily prevalent in young women. Also, violence against and murder of infants is repeatedly referred to, but the fact that it is the one type of violence we see nearly equally shared by women (probably due to proximity as much as anything) and men is not explored. I am by no means calling this author a "femme-nazi" or whatever anti-feminist term is popular now. I just feel that a large part of our culture's attraction to violence is our easy ability to create divisions - an "otherness." if one is to write a treatise against violence, why widen an existing division?
Another anomaly came up in it's constant referrals to Columbine. Now, I m absolutely no proponent of legal guns whatsoever (quite the opposite, in fact), but I found it odd and awfully single-minded that the poet spoke of the shooters' ability to handle and use guns when no attention was paid to the violence these boys were subjected to on school grounds, how those in charge were so inundated with violence that they did nothing to stop this situation in advance. By some accounts, there were multiple times that these boys were stoned on school grounds. There is no mention of this abuse, however.
Am I offering an answer? Absolutely not. But if you seek to understand violence, I think you need to start by looking at the full picture. This is what I feel was missing from this examination.
I am definitely open to debate on these thoughts. I feel that our cultural love of violence in America needs to be examined much more and I applaud Carr for doing so. I am just unimpressed literarily and somewhat confused thematically. I really looked forward to reading this volume. I was just ultimately disappointed.
I felt that it was strongest in it's most concrete, narrative moments, (such as the two prose poems that make up section 42), but it strayed into the scattered wordplay so often that it undermined it's own statement. I am not ignorant of the postmodern forces at work here... I just question if they work.
If this book means to speak out against all violence, there are some strange anomalies. While a great majority of violent acts are perpetrated by men (a fact I am well aware of, please understand), the author seems intent on skewing the data even further that way. The poet brings up self mutilation through cutting only in a male character - a violent act which is heavily prevalent in young women. Also, violence against and murder of infants is repeatedly referred to, but the fact that it is the one type of violence we see nearly equally shared by women (probably due to proximity as much as anything) and men is not explored. I am by no means calling this author a "femme-nazi" or whatever anti-feminist term is popular now. I just feel that a large part of our culture's attraction to violence is our easy ability to create divisions - an "otherness." if one is to write a treatise against violence, why widen an existing division?
Another anomaly came up in it's constant referrals to Columbine. Now, I m absolutely no proponent of legal guns whatsoever (quite the opposite, in fact), but I found it odd and awfully single-minded that the poet spoke of the shooters' ability to handle and use guns when no attention was paid to the violence these boys were subjected to on school grounds, how those in charge were so inundated with violence that they did nothing to stop this situation in advance. By some accounts, there were multiple times that these boys were stoned on school grounds. There is no mention of this abuse, however.
Am I offering an answer? Absolutely not. But if you seek to understand violence, I think you need to start by looking at the full picture. This is what I feel was missing from this examination.
I am definitely open to debate on these thoughts. I feel that our cultural love of violence in America needs to be examined much more and I applaud Carr for doing so. I am just unimpressed literarily and somewhat confused thematically. I really looked forward to reading this volume. I was just ultimately disappointed.
June 3, 2022
I was due for a re-read on this. I took it very slow & I think that's the best way to digest these poems that are so deeply involved with gun violence and sexual violence. She has a stunning way of saying so much in the subtext, of articulating the emotions around fear and violence while also grappling with the impossible task of writing about such terrible things. And I am forever moved by the way her words encourage the reader to zoom in and out simultaneously, to focus in on any detail we come by and interpret its contextual relationship with the subject matter. I find the juxtaposition of small violences within the context of much larger ones to be extremely affective.
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August 25, 2010Prepare for the 2010 Poets Forum in New York City (October 28-30) by reading Carr's newest book of poetry, and check out the Poets Forum 2010 bookshelf for the latest collections by each of the poets participating in the Poets Forum. Happy reading!
September 1, 2014
yes! yes yes yes!
you must read this.
you must read this.
April 1, 2017
"It took a long time to be able to observe her rage and say to myself, ‘That has nothing to do with me.’ And even when, at age ten, I could say this, I am certain I did not believe it. By then she too had become an object of disgust. In defense I imagined my future children, how well I would love them, how calm I would be. In fact, I am not calm. But it is true that they remain the reason I am writing this, the reason I am afraid to write this, and the reason that writing this cannot be the only activity within any day that matters. Let me back up farther. For what motivates is less one’s own grievances than a growing sense that the social world of houses and families, of children and gardens, is scotch tape. Scotch tape. Perhaps it is difficult to peel off, but it is not at all difficult to see the objects and events to which it adheres.”
A book of unbelievable intelligence and precision and scope.
A book of unbelievable intelligence and precision and scope.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews