When We Were Gun: A Narrative Poetry Cycle
Deborah Schupack (2025)
$20 softcover
$20 softcover
Pre-Order Now - Available October 18
Description
WINNER OF THE LOUISVILLE REVIEW’S NATIONAL POETRY BOOK CONTEST
When We Were Gun: A Narrative Poetry Cycle dares to explore the collective conscience of elementary school parents as they gather outside a school shooting. A vivid and urgent choral voice emerges as the parents try to make sense of the new fault line between the everyday and the end-of-the-world.
Praise for When We Were Gun: A Narrative Poetry Cycle
In Deborah Schupack’s When We Were Gun, America’s tragedy of school shootings unfolds in a stunningly crafted three-part drama. A child gifted in math computes the twenty-two-factorial used for the class seating chart, trying to account for his friends who ran into the hall before he heard the pops. From the point of view of parents waiting and a narrator giving witness, a vulnerable “we” emerges that understands a parent’s deepest nightmare: “We were those who waited / and those who no longer wait / those who would get our children back / and those who wouldn’t.” As I read this manuscript, there were school shootings around our country happening as if in a sick, surrealistic depiction of what I was reading. Which was real, which was the story? When We Were Gun is essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the shattering impacts of school shootings.
—Jeanie Thompson, contest judge and author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller
—Jeanie Thompson, contest judge and author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller
Intelligent and beautifully written, When We Were Gun relates the imagined story of one ordinary day in one elementary school selected by a person carrying a gun. Most of the poems in Deborah Schupack’s debut collection are from the point of view the children’s parents. From the moment they attend a morning concert given by their children until they learn the fate of each child and teacher in the building at the end of the day, we readers know that this community’s truth will change every person involved forever, but we wonder if our citizenry will ever act to stop the futile carnage.
—Maureen Morehead, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2011–2012 and author of A Sense of Time Left, The Melancholy Teacher, and The Red Gate
The poet Adrienne Rich wrote that “The question for a North American poet is how to bear witness to a reality from which the public—and maybe part of the poet—wants, or is persuaded it wants, to turn away.” One reality from which we the public want to turn away is rampage shootings: there are too many, each one is too much. With her attentive and unflinching When We Were Gun, though, Deborah Schupack has chosen not to turn away but instead to take on that poetic responsibility, that human responsibility: to bear witness.
—H. L. Hix, author of American Outrage: A Testamentary
Photo by Rana Faure
About the Author
Deborah Schupack is the author of two novels, Sylvan Street (Plume, 2010) and The Boy on the Bus (Free Press, 2003), which the author James Patterson called “my favorite book this year—an incredible page-turning idea, written with grace, style, and deep, true emotion.” She has also written a narrative nonfiction book, Relentless (Mount Sinai Press, 2022), about a New York City health system mobilizing astonishing science and medicine in the Covid pandemic. When We Were Gun is her first collection of poetry. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
