“The Bullet Takes Forever holds a massive mirror up to our country's deadly relationship with gun violence, from the perspective of both the bullets and the humans who wield them. With calculated precision and considered framing, this collection holds space for the anger, frustration, fear, and agony that gun violence inspires, and calls its readers to recognize the humanity we risk losing by accepting these events as ordinary.”

—S.C. Says, author of Golden Brown Skin

“At once personal and political, serious and satirical, these poems repurpose familiar tropes and phrases about guns to offer intimate snapshots. In her most surreal and surprising poems, Kasa personifies and reimagines “the bullet” in existential crisis, yearning to “abandon itself mid-flight,” to become a camera or a key, an object of softness, perhaps, like “the sound of feathers resettling in a pillow.” This book seeks to break through silence and taboo, to ask Why can’t we be safe? “What about the children?”

—Hollie Hardy, author of Lions Like Us and How to Take a Bullet: And Other Survival Poems

“Heidi Kasa creates a world where bullets “ache to serve a higher purpose. / To be a wheelbarrow distributing seeds.” In this collection, the poet reminds us that there are things in this equally beautiful and divided country of ours that one simply cannot unsee. This is the America we live in now, and this collection unflinchingly reminds us of this. What Heidi Kasa has written here is the truth: “The bullet asks to be a divining rod, a rake, or a crucifix. / The bullet asks to be a space rather than creating one.” 

—Joaquín Zihuatanejo, author of Occupy Whiteness and Arsonist

“Beauty and horror coexist in Heidi Kasa’s The Bullet Takes Forever, as she juxtaposes luminous imagery with the gloom and stark reality of pervasive gun violence. Her deft command of poetics lures the reader by guiding the eye and heart through the seesaw of loss and hope to persevere. The turns and layering in Kasa’s wordplay build emotions that make her work memorable, remarkable, and powerful.”               

—Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal, author of Watcha

“The Bullet Takes Forever asks us questions, confronts our assumptions, challenges cliched thinking and semantics around violence, and demands that we see, really SEE, using all of our eyes. The book speaks to the depth of the author’s commitment to a clearer and more human future where love can emerge as our salvation value. One of the most stunning and effective works of art in any medium I’ve experienced that speaks to a social crisis.”

—Jeffrey Bryant, author of The Catacombs of Vanished Lovers