Poems Wherein the Bullet Speaks: A Review of Heidi Kasa’s ‘The Bullet Takes Forever’

Resonant amid the Trump administration’s rollback of gun regulations, Heidi Kasa’s debut poetry collection reminds readers of the lasting human cost of America’s gun violence.

Editor’s note: This review appears as the Trump administration moves to roll back more than three dozen federal gun regulations, including rules affecting illegal gun sales and purchaser eligibility. At the same time, a proposed federal rule could make it easier for licensed dealers to ship firearms directly to buyers’ homes—a change that could financially benefit online gun retailer GrabAGun, whose board includes Donald Trump Jr. Against that backdrop, Heidi Kasa’s The Bullet Takes Forever remains a timely meditation on the human cost of America’s gun violence. As the national conversation again turns toward deregulation rather than prevention, Kasa’s poems remind readers what those policy debates often leave out: the lasting human consequences of gun violence.

You might not be advised to buy a book for its cover, but the same can’t be said about its title. Consider the title of Heidi Kasa’s first book of poetry, published by Mouthfeel Press: The Bullet Takes Forever. In seven syllables, Kasa’s title conjures a wide swath of loss, both vertical and horizontal, the catastrophic consequences of gun violence, robbing us of time and life itself.

Consider the power wielded by the prototypical word “take”: a word with more than 50 meanings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary; also, among the first words we learn to spell as children.

The way the title lands is a fine indicator of the way Kasa’s poems will strike the courageous reader, the reader willing to dwell for a time in this space dedicated to examining violence, often delivered upon the most vulnerable among us.

Some of the poems speak for themselves, such as the list poem titled “Back to School Shopping List 2024,” beginning with

“1. backpack (big enough to hide behind)”

—and then progressing as time would progress:

“2. notebook (for reunification records)” … “7. spelling test (words: tourniquet, instructions, wound, direct, manual, pressure).”

There is hardly a poem here without the word “gun” or “bullet.” The poems absent of “gun” or “bullet” utilize synecdoche or metonym, sprayed with words like “trigger” or “shooter.”

To say it is a dark book, a troubling book, is an understatement. There is no escape; there is no breath. Hope, however, shows up in rare instances—five times, exactly, in poems Kasa calls “the five bullet poems” scattered throughout the collection, spun, we are told, from an idea inspired by K-Ming Chang’s novel, Bestiary, namely the line:

“A bullet doesn’t ask to be given back.”

Kasa’s poems offer the simple comfort that comes from knowing you are not alone.

The first of the five bullet poems, a prose poem titled “The Bullet Cures,” implies that the bullet itself is an unwitting victim. Here are the first lines of each paragraph:

“The bullet asks to be the fire that melts it….

“The bullet asks to be given back, returned to the earth….

“The bullet asks to be the cure….

“The bullet asks to crumble in pieces….

“The bullet wants to be the echo, not be echoed….

And here’s the last paragraph, the end of the poem.

“The bullet asks to rest, to rest. To rest.”

The other four bullet poems are also prose poems, each ennobling the bullet, endowing agency, conferring purposeful, dignified and also quotidian desires upon the bullet—in great contrast to the deadly intention of the human being pulling the trigger.

And yet, as it stands for those of us who regard so much that is self-evident, incontestable in our current world, we seem to be compelled to make a case for the preponderance and the easy access of guns, that seem so obviously what is to blame for the massive violence caused by guns. And that violent masculinity underscores the fact that most of those who commit mass shootings are men.

“#NotAllGuns” serves as the title for the poem that best speaks to some of the positions taken by gun rights proponents:

Here is the first stanza:

“Not all guns kill people/ but some do,/ it’s true”….

The third stanza reads:

“The gun is innocent/ until proven/useful.”

One of the following stanzas repeats the first stanza, with “men” substituted for “guns.”

Later in the poem, Kasa takes up the shaming of women for pointing out the obvious, and the poem finishes with,

“I want to hear/ from the guns/ that don’t shoot things.”

Here are 60 pages of poetry, along with a few pages of prose on either side, namely a preface at the beginning, suggesting what has informed these poems, experiences Kasa, herself, has had, as a mother of school-age children living in Texas, along with acknowledgments at the end.

One cannot help but observe that narrative poems are few—likely because the reader can provide the narrative. Reading Kasa’s gun poems triggers the narratives that have lived for decades in our minds and hearts and bodies. We know the story. We have been living the story.