Perennial

by Kelly Forsythe

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566895170
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	08/07/2018
Pages:	75
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

Table of Contents

Opening Doors 1

Historical Documents 3

Moral Panic 4

Colony Collapse 6

1999 8

Curved 9

Requiem 10

Colorado, Hunting 11

A poem in which I am dreaming 12

No, Everything 13

Call to Action 14

Planner Notes, 7th grade 16

We Are in a Room with Small Windows 18

The Skeptic 19

The Stranger 20

Transcript: Basement Tape 21

Before and After Peril 22

Helix 23

Muscle Memory 24

But the Ghosts 25

Hold My Wrist 27

We drove looking for ghosts on the gravel road 28

Journal 29

Emotional Intelligence 30

Witness 32

Red Earth 34

Library Version 35

Jefferson County 36

Flood Water 37

Through the science lab window 38

Landscape: Witness Report 40

Indoor Voices 41

Homeroom 42

Day Zero 44

Cliff Theory 45

I wanted to live, of course 46

Sleepwalking after CCD 49

Periphery 51

Imagining an Aftermath 52

Springtime 53

Perennial 54

The Journal of the Girls 55

Slow Burn 57

Part Nocturne 58

Portrait 59

March 60

Reunion 61

Notes 63

Acknowledgments 65

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/16/2018
Forsythe’s intense and disquieting debut reckons with grief, senseless violence, compassion, and adolescent alienation centered on the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Her speakers include the victims, the shooters (who speak directly through excerpts from their journals), a teenage girl living halfway across the country, and an adult reflecting on that teenage girl’s experience. Forsythe details her settings, such as the bedroom of one of the shooters, in a chilling and reverential manner. “You dream under/ a poster of Jenny McCarthy,” she writes. “Fingertips cut from a leather/ glove in a wastebasket.” Recalling the media hysteria of the time, Forsythe describes how the public is “made/ to fear a game in which/ dragons & dungeons/ lead to unchecked occult/ madness.” The angst of adolescence is palpable (“the/ physical boundaries/ of our bodies are cruel/ against the shell of school”), and hormones make the speaker feel “frantic, a werewolf/ in a palace of full moons.” The terror of the students in the school’s library synthesizes the mundane and the disastrous: “A boy in cargo pants, a student, seventeen, a table. A gun and a bomb. All of us have book bags with notes with hearts at the bottom.” 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. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly Best Summer Books of 2018
Nylon “46 Great Books To Read This Summer”

“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

“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

“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

“Perennial adeptly captures the complexity of the subject and reminds readers how difficult it is to understand and overcome such events, even decades later.” —Washington Post

“The columbine, a perennial, is said to look like an eagle’s claw or five doves huddled together. Both are apt definitions fitting this fine debut collection.” —Library Journal

“Perennial shifts the conversation about school shootings from policy to people.” —CNN

“[A] ‘coming-of-age’ story about what it means when feeling safe has drastically changed.” —PBS

“Forsythe delivers precise lines of pain . . . but what also appears is the dizzying sense that even in these banal spaces, humanity remains.” —The Millions

“Perennial feels like a reckoning with our collective grief that Columbine ever happened, and that it has happened again and again. . .” —Nylon

“The sad fact is violence endures; it is perennial. But so too are the girls who have to face it, who have to live through it, who have to find ways to behave that will not make them targets of this rage. Forsythe’s book offers us the chance to be devastated into awareness and awareness into action, if only we will listen and let it go to seed.” —American Micro Reviews

“Perennial is intimate and unflinching in its capacity to pull the reader into these moments—beautiful and frightening in its emotional unfurling. It is not a light read, but it is a vital one.” —Arkansas International

“Forsythe’s poems . . . construct the possibility of a new narrative while keeping the truth intact.” —fields magazine

“At the center of Kelly Forsythe’s debut collection is a pulsating violence that beats in our ears, a threat at the periphery of our vision that we keep turning and turning to see. ‘We were in the midst of it all the time,’ declares one poem—and to read Perennial is to be ever in the midst, held captive, always moving within a world of impermeable borders. These poems reverberate against their walls—the walls of a classroom, of a school, the seemingly closed system of adolescence, the boundaries of the body itself—creating an atmosphere of unnerving intimacy. And what exists beyond these barriers? Perennial tests its fences, peers through the cracks to catch a glimmer of the unknown: a light that might burst through to free us, or consume us.” —Camille Rankine

“What happens after the flowers? After carnage and grief? Who gets to become themselves and who doesn’t? This book splits the world in two—a mirror before and after violence, a fearlessness revealing the lines and paths of fear, a split screen of innocence and devastation. Kelly Forsythe is a true word-witch, casting spells to pierce their easy surfaces, to let multiple stranger, brilliant meanings leak out. She sees tiny key details as clues to the bigger mysteries and lets a generous beauty take root in a ground of fear and chaos which ‘suddenly knew / the underside of infinity.’ In the rare poetries of compassion and complexity—Forché, Glück, Nye— Forsythe is next, now, with a deep and supple art that makes more than sense, more than peace, more than a reckoning. It makes a way forward, heart refilled again and again with blood and life and blossoming future. If we are going to keep going, we need this devastating and gorgeous book.” —Brenda Shaughnessy

From the Publisher

★ 06/15/2018
If a book of poems can be described as a page-turner, this volume qualifies. Based on the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 and its aftermath, an event that has been repeated countless times since, these poems are positioned to include not only the killers and their victims but the author herself as a young girl realizing the tenuous nature of life. Forsythe starts at the beginning, her tone becoming more ominous almost immediately. "It started with two births/ as quiet as pinpricks…" and continues "& after the hospital,/ they went home/ & lived in their/ mountains which/ were supposed/ to be merciful/ but the air up there/ tore its own breath away." Written in free verse, with a sparseness of punctuation that propels them forward, these pieces have the inevitability of the perennial flowers that return in spring. VERDICT The columbine, a perennial, is said to look like an eagle's claw or five doves huddled together. Both are apt definitions fitting this fine debut collection.—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal