Queer author Dudgrick Bevins’ book ‘Vigil’ gives a voice to the voiceless
Mass shootings in America always sadden and anger me. And I’m sure most people feel the same.
I was 13 years old on April 20, 1999 when the Columbine High School Massacre happened. I remember hearing about it, and just asking myself, and possibly my teachers, “Why?”
I was 17 years old when I heard of the John McDonough High School shooting in New Orleans on April 14, 2003. It happened only about five or ten minutes away from my school. Students were discussing it on the yard during lunch time; some were shocked, some were afraid, some were sad, but many seemed relieved knowing that it didn’t happen at our school.
I was a 27 year old substitute teacher and teaching artist working in Baltimore when the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School happened on December 14, 2012. I remember thinking, “What if that had been the school I was working in today?”
I was 29 years old when the middle school I was working at in Northeast Washington, DC went into lockdown. I remember having to turn off the lights and get down on the floor behind the teacher’s desk while also trying to keep the students as calm and quiet as I could. I remember how relieved they were to find out that the only threat was a BB gun found in an eighth grade student’s locker.
And now, more than 20 years after the Columbine High School Massacre, I live in a country that still refuses to regulate firearms, despite the hundreds of names and pictures being memorialized at candlelight vigils all over the country on a daily basis. How many more candles must we light?
Inspired by Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, queer author Dudgrick Bevins’ new work, entitled Vigil, is a book of poems with characters that speak from beyond the grave. Bevins has imagined the victims of a fictional high school shooting and what they might have to share if they could speak to us. The book is a story-in-poems, told from the afterlife by dead teenagers who were victims of a school shooting.
At this point, the stories seem so common that we rarely even speak the names anymore. The lives lost seem like casualties in a war with capitalism, greed and false patriotism; a war that we seem to be losing.
But these names — these lives, rather — are more than just casualties; They are more than just extras in some crime-drama being watched from the living room sofa. Speaking the names of those who lost their lives is important, but knowing who they were — authentically and imperfectly — would be even better.
We may never know what many of these victims were thinking or feeling before their lives were taken, but in this book, author Dudgrick Bevins gives voice to the voiceless. Like a holding seance, Vigil is both unsettling and affirming.
It almost feels reductive to call these written pieces “poems”. What Bevins captures, though beautifully written, is more than just pretty words. He uses his ingenuity to create real souls; some imperfect and flawed, but authentic and whole. We know who each and every last one of these souls are because, even though they may have been purely imagined, it’s as if Bevins has heard each and every one of their voices speak to him.
If I had to use a better word than “poems” to describe what Bevins has written, I would call them “soul songs”. As he writes in his introduction, “I hope that if you listen carefully, you can hear America singing, singing a mourning song, a dirge.” Yes, these are the American voices that have gone unheard. These are the true American voices that cry out for justice as their pleas land on deaf ears.
In a time where we must continue to scream “Black Lives Matter!” as police officers strangle Black and Brown people in the streets; in a time where women, queers and trans people must still fight to prove their humanity to cishet white men who scoff at their concerns; and 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.
Vigil is now available from bd-studios.com or your favorite bookstore.
Hear Dudgrick Bevins talk about Vigil on The Bear World Podcast!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dudgrick Bevins is a queer interdisciplinary artist from North Georgia who lives, teaches, and creates in New York City. His poetry volumes are published by bd-studios.com and Poet’s Haven.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
bd-studios.com is the art and publishing studio by luke kurtis. Vigil by Dudgrick Bevins is the newest poetry publication, following like an angel dead in your arms: early poems 1995–1999 by luke kurtis and (This Is Not A) Mixtape for the End of the World by Daniel Shapiro, both from last year. A debut solo collection from Anastasia Walker is forthcoming. Other releases from bd include an ongoing line of artists’ books such as the recently published Architecture and Mortality by Donald Tarantino, Just One More by Jonathan David Smyth, and The Animal Book by Michael Harren.
