Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
