RaveFieldsAs she gives her cyborg/cephalopod personas power and agency, she graciously gifts the reader the freedom to imagine other worlds, though still cautioning which universes we choose to claim.
Kelly Forsythe
RavefieldsPerennial forces the reader to inhabit the bodies of both those directly involved with the shooting and those on the outside looking in, demonstrating the lasting impact of the event. Forsythe writes just as convincingly from the perspectives of the victims and the shooters as she does from her own seventh-grade self ... The depth of Forsythe’s research is heavily felt in these pages, as she draws from police reports, transcripts, and journal excerpts for the language and images used in her poems ... A talented wordsmith, Forsythe is interested as much in the meaning behind each word she chooses as the emotion each word evokes ... Forsythe’s diction is so purposeful that she will sometimes use a word connected with the parts of a gun (i.e., \'a barrel of lipstick\'), so that even when she is not outright speaking about the shooting, it is always there in some small way ... The power of Forsythe’s poems is how they construct the possibility of a new narrative while keeping the truth intact.
