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

"Set back, growing dim,
it pulsed: a gray hour
of oxygen?could it be

mid-winter within
him? Shaking
out a muscle: we

are somewhere
averting. We are
backwards or in
a trance or in a
dioxide stargazing."

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.

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.