The Bullet Takes Forever Book Launch Party
Join us for the launch of Heidi Kasa's first full-length poetry collection, The Bullet Takes Forever from Mouthfeel Press.
Featuring:
Kim Denning
Hollie Hardy
S.C. Says
Stalina Villarreal
Heidi Kasa
Friday, December 5, 2025
6:30pm
Birdhouse Books
5925 Burnet Rd
Austin, TX
About the Author
Heidi Kasa is the author of the poetry collection The Bullet Takes Forever, the flash fiction collection The Beginners, winner of the 2023 Digging Press Chapbook Contest, and Split. She received the 2024 Plaza Prose Poetry Prize and the 2023 Poetry Super Highway Prize for poems from The Bullet Takes Forever. Kasa's work has appeared in Barrelhouse, The Brooklyn Rail, The Pinch Journal Online, and elsewhere. She works as an editor in Austin and creates handmade artist books. Find her at www.heidikasa.com.
About the Book
The Bullet Takes Forever holds a massive mirror up to our country's deadly relationship with gun violence, from the perspective of both the bullets and the humans who wield them. With calculated precision and considered framing, this collection holds space for the anger, frustration, fear, and agony that gun violence inspires, and calls its readers to recognize the humanity we risk losing by accepting these events as ordinary.
~S.C. Says, author of Golden Brown Skin
At once personal and political, serious and satirical, these poems repurpose familiar tropes and phrases about guns to offer intimate snapshots of a dangerous new normal. In her most surreal and surprising poems, Kasa personifies and reimagines the bullet in existential crisis, yearning to “abandon itself mid-flight,” to become a camera or a key, an object of softness, perhaps, like “the sound of feathers resettling in a pillow.” This book seeks to break through silence and taboo, to ask Why can’t we be safe? What about the children?
~Hollie Hardy, author of Lions Like Us and How to Take a Bullet: And Other Survival Poems
Beauty and horror coexist in Heidi Kasa’s The Bullet Takes Forever, as she juxtaposes luminous imagery with the gloom and stark reality of pervasive gun violence. Her deft command of poetics lures the reader by guiding the eye and heart through the seesaw of loss and hope to persevere. The turns and layering in Kasa’s wordplay build emotions that make her work memorable, remarkable, and powerful.
~Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal, author of Watcha