But being two months away from a terrifying election, I didn’t know if my head was in the right space for such an important message. So I don’t think I even appreciated it as much as I should have. I read Carry quickly, speeding through it almost like ripping off a band-aid, knowing it would be difficult and wanting to just be done. Carry is powerful, so very current, and a poetic expression of the violence Toni Jensen has experienced so far in her life. And I always seem to get something out of every memoir I read. It seems strange to put a star rating on someone’s real-life story, something they’ve written how they remember it, and how they interpreted it. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one’s country is not the same as surviving one’s country. In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history – as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates. In “Women in the Fracklands”, Jensen takes the listener inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and bears witness to the peril faced by women in regions overcome by the fracking boom. “At the Workshop” focuses on her graduate school years, during which a workshop classmate repeatedly killed off thinly veiled versions of her in his stories. “The Worry Line” explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. In Carry, 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. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of indigenous women, on indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten.

And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. But mostly physical, emotional, and gun violence.Ī powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s encounters with gun violence.

Carry by toni jensen