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Tell by Soraya Peerbaye6/11/2023 I thought one of the strongest qualities of the book was that Peerbaye makes the landscape witness to the horror so that these poems are heavy with the terror of tides, the outrage of the hills surrounding, and the keen grief cast on the eelgrass and shoreline. These 48 poems are the unfolding of a tragedy of the worst sort which takes possession of a community and the lives in it. They speak of racism and a rivalrous rage these kids hardly understood but which was fueled in part by their admiration for Los Angeles gang culture. They're full of teenage anxiety and confusion. These 48 poems are haunting and dream-like. Tell: poems for a girlhood relates the events of that night as well as the subsequent investigations and trials in which a boy and a girl were found guilty of murder. She managed to get away across the bridge but was followed by 2 of the group who beat her again, and then one of the girls held her head under the water until she drowned. There she was swarmed by 8 of the group and savagely beaten. In November 1997 a 14-year old high school girl of South Asian descent named Reena Virk, living in a community just north of Victoria on Vancouver Island, was murdered by a group of kids who'd invited her to a gathering near a local bridge.
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