A genre-bending, heartbreaking book-length lyric poem about a gay teenager’s stabbing in a rural town

When a gay teenager is mercilessly stabbed in a high school bathroom in West Nowhere, Nova Scotia, the surrounding community is sent into a tailspin. While Colton fights for his life in a hospital room at West Nowhere General, everyone from a school janitor to the boy’s abusive stepfather overflows with emotion in the form of verse monologues, unburdening themselves of their feelings.

The Bright Afters is a poetic container for the pain endured by the town and surrounding area — and sometimes, their confessions. The voices we hear from include the sympathetic (a favorite teacher) and the arresting (the kid who stabbed Colton). As Colton recovers, his powder keg sister Christine and his escapist best friend, Annie, have the most to lose from the act that almost killed him — and the most to gain from coming to a new understanding about the senseless violence.

Told from a variety of perspectives, The Bright Afters seeks to interrogate collective and individual trauma, queer belonging, and the ways in which a place sculpts the people it produces. Its individual poems take their names from Broadway shows, containing all of the community’s fraught hope for a positive “big finish” to the story.