When We Were Gun

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 will get their children back / and those who won't."