“Innocence and violence are the poles of this debut collection about the Columbine school shooting, where even lipstick tubes call to mind gun barrels and where children, like flowers, ‘are beautiful, then die.’”
—The New York Times
“Perennial adeptly captures the complexity of the subject and reminds readers how difficult it is to understand and overcome such events, even decades later.”
—The Washington Post
“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
“[Forsythe's] book provides glimpses with such rigor that together they become a surveillance. . . .a helix of collective burdens and individual pain.”
—Anomaly
"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
“Perennial hauntingly explores a side of the Columbine shooting that is not commonly seen: the view of a young girl who has had to live her life as a non-fatality, a survivor but still a victim.”
—Call Me [Brackets]
“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
“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.”
—Brenda Shaughnessy
