Reading: Kelly Forsythe’s Perennial

Milkweed Books
1011 Washington Ave S
Open Book | 1st Floor
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States

FREE and all are welcome.

6122152540

Join us in the bookstore to hear Kelly Forsythe read from Perennial, her debut collection of poems. Kelly will be joined by local fiction writer Karen Gu. Reading from Kelly and Karen followed by book signing and reception. Presented in partnership with Coffee House Press. LEARN MORE.

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

Girlhood, selfhood, and the fragility of safety in tender poems that examine and then mourn micro- and macroscopic violence. 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.

KELLY FORSYTHE’S work has been published in Black Warrior Review, The Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, and Columbia Poetry Review, among others. Forsythe was the director of publicity for Copper Canyon Press for over half a decade and is the founder of Phantom Books, an online literary journal and chapbook press. She teaches creative writing in the Jiménez-Porter Writers House at the University of Maryland and works at National Geographic.

KAREN GU is a fiction writer based in Minneapolis. She is a 2017-2018 Fiction Fellow in the Loft Mentor Series and a 2018 Jack Jones Retreat Fellow.