Starve the Vulture

"Jaunty, frank, and compelling, Carney shares his instructive story with generosity and insight."
--Booklist

"Carney will easily win sympathy for his life, in which he has persevered to show others the hard work of his salvation."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Before he was a sex-addict-crackhead-boozer-porn-salesman sliding downward in the Dallas demimonde, Jason Carney was a poet, a lowlife who prized his thesaurus as much as his speed pipe...He made it out, and Starve the Vulture tells how he did it, how poetic ecstasy trumped sordid pleasure. Brisk, electric, and moving, his story recalls both Baudelaire's Intimate Journals and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress."
--J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life

"While everyone with a pen claims to have been to hell and back, Jason Carney crafts his own harrowing perdition with a singular voice that is brash, unflinching, and eerily poetic."
--Patricia Smith, author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

"As Jason Carney takes himself from transgression to transcendence, he takes us with him. What starves the vulture will feed the reader."
--Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive

The latest from Akashic's Kaylie Jones Books imprint.

A lyrical, mesmerizing debut from Jason Carney who overcomes his own racism, homophobia, drug addiction, and harrowing brushes with death to find redemption and unlikely fame on the national performance poetry circuit. Woven into Carney's path to recovery is a powerful family story, depicting the roots of prejudice and dysfunction through several generations.