Citizen Shooter - a crown of sonnets based on the Kenosha shootings of August 2020

AUTHOR: Brianna Tollefson
FACULTY: Diane Raptosh
DEPARTMENT: English

ABSTRACT

My creative work, "Citizen Shooter," a crown of sonnets (a thematic sonnet series that repeats the last line as the first of the succeeding), is an illumination and critique of how the American justice system and the government have dealt with the Kenosha, Wisconsin, shootings of August 2020 perpetrated by Kyle Rittenhouse. This piece was my final project for the prison literature class, Prose & Cons, under Professor Raptosh in Fall 2021. The case of Rittenhouse and his innocence, or lack thereof, had become a media sensation and a contentious topic that was misrepresented. To get a full picture of exactly what had happened in Kenosha required reading many different sources as discussions of these August 25^th, 2020, events were fragmented. I knew that with such a highly debated topic, it was best to have as much information with as little explicit opinion as possible, which caused the crown to be less traditionally "poetic". I ended up devoting each sonnet in the crown to a particular subtopic; the repetitive lines serve as transitional phrases. The sonnet crown sequence never directly names the shooter because his name is the only thing many really know about what happened. What matters more are the victims of his violence. This sonnet crown is a way to reach people about the issue and a means to articulate greater problems of the current justice system and political climate. I also include potential issues that this legal precedent could lead to as well as some social situations that might have led to these events. They could lead to further instances of citizens "protecting private property," as the psychological and social implications of the decision to label Rittenhouse's actions "legal" are grave and even more impactful than the immediate damage of dismissing the fact that two people died.