Vigil

by Dudgrick Bevins

Vigil is an eloquent and elegant story in poems, told from the afterlife by dead teenagers who were victims of a school shooting. Like Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, Bevins’s poems give voice to the souls who can no longer speak for themselves. The afterlife for this bunch of teenagers, as it turns out, is full of gossip and idle chatter, not unlike the school halls they wandered in life. Even from the beyond, they have the same wishes, fears, hopes, and dreams as those they left behind. Vigil is a poetic condemnation of the gun violence that plagues the United States, but it is also a celebration of life.

”In a time where the voices of our youth are taken away from us before they’re even given a chance to recognize their own potential, Vigil reminds the rest of America, once again, to listen.”

—Kyle Jackson, Bear World / Queer Forty

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