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About
The events of 1999's Columbine shooting preoccupy Forsythe in these poems, refracting her vision to encompass killer, victim, and herself as a girl, suddenly aware of the precarity of her own life and the porousness of her body to others' gaze, demands, violence. Deeply researched and even more deeply felt, Perennial inhabits landscapes of emerging adulthood and explosive cruelty-the hills of Pittsburgh and the sere grass of Colorado; the spines of books in a high school library that has become a killing ground; the tenderness of children as they grow up and grow hard, becoming acquainted with dread, grief, and loss.
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Reviews
"Kelly Forsythe takes us through the Columbine massacre from the perspective of a teenage girl forced to reckon, for the first time, with brutality and helplessness. Laced with lyricism, anguished searching, and a heartbreaking delicacy of perception, Perennial is a book born of devastation that lifts us into new forms of empathy. The poems glow with life."
Joanna Klink
"Forsythe's moving catalogue of a horrific event becomes a diagram of senselessness where minutiae take on a stark and eerie resonance when read beside today's headlines."
Publishers Weekly
"This incredible, lyrical, profoundly moving book of poems revolves around the Columbine High School massacre, and delineates the experience of living before and after such extreme tragedy."
Nylon