Split Air, by Kayla Howe

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Split Air confronts America’s epidemic of gun violence through poems that move between the national and the deeply personal. Some are rooted in the author’s own family history, others in public tragedies etched into the American consciousness, from Columbine and Sandy Hook to Parkland, Uvalde, Aurora, Orlando, and Las Vegas. Across varied forms, these poems render violence not as abstraction but as lived experience.

Together, the collection becomes a chorus of mourning and warning, refusing to let tragedy dissolve into numb repetition. Split Air captures both the brutal shock of a bullet and the lingering dread that shadows daily American life. With urgency and force, it seeks to jolt us back into the raw space after a shooting, when grief is sharp, action feels imperative, and complacency has not yet set in. From that space, change is possible.

Kayla Howe writes about politics, policy, and their personal impact. After a small-town upbringing in the Midwest, she spent nearly a decade abroad in China, India, and Brazil as a U.S. diplomat, experiences that continue to shape her writing. Now based in San Francisco, she lives with her husband, three children, and many pets. Her debut chapbook, Vignettes Under Authoritarianism, examines life under a consolidating autocracy, while Split Air turns its gaze inward on the American landscape, confronting the epidemic of gun violence with both intimacy and urgency. She can be found on Instagram at khowe.writing.