A 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.
“Essential .
. . We need more voices like Toni Jensen’s, more books like
Carry.”—Tommy Orange, New York Times bestselling author of
There There
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. 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. And she has always known that in this she is not alone.
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.
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. In the title
chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own
experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. “The
Worry Line” explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood
the year her daughter was born. “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. In “Women
in the Fracklands,” Jensen takes the reader 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.
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. With each chapter, Carry
reminds us that surviving in one’s country is not the same as
surviving one’s country.