Shoah Train

by William Heyen

Over the decades, William Heyen has most often dreamed of, studied, and written about the Holocaust. Now, Shoah Train collects more than seventy poems written over the last dozen years, lyrics of “discipline and honesty and courage and restraint,” as Archibald MacLeish described The Swastika Poems . Shoah Train was a National Book Award finalist for poetry in 2004. William Heyen is a former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany and has won awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, Poetry , and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in many leading journals and more than one hundred anthologies. Shoah Train was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2004. He is professor of English and poet in residence at the State University of New York at Brockport.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 2003

About the author

William Heyen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940, and raised in Suffolk County by German immigrant parents. His graduate degrees are from Ohio University. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has been honored with NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy of Arts & Letters and other awards. His poetry has appeared in the Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and in hundreds of other magazines and anthologies. His Crazy Horse in Stillness won the Small Press Book Award in 1997; Shoah Train: Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004. Heyen is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at his undergraduate alma mater, SUNY Brockport.
Etruscan also published his September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (2002), The Confessions of Doc Williams & Other Poems (2006), A Poetics of Hiroshima (2008), and The Football Corporations (2011).

His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Nation,The Ontario Review, and in over one hundred anthologies. Heyen is the author of: Erika: Poems of the Holocaust; The Host: Selected Poems 1965-1990 (both Time-Being Books, 1991, 1994); Diana, Charles, & the Queen; Crazy Horse in Stillness (both from BOA Editions, Ltd, 1998, 1996), the latter of which won the 1997 National Small Press Book Award for Poetry.

Reviews

[Jeff Tigchelaar · Rating 5 out of 5]

this man is a serious poet. serious about the craft, his subject matter...heard him read one night at Aquinas College...he did most of his stuff from memory. his voice and his intensity were thundersome.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

poetry about death camps and mengele and trains. felt like my guts were being ripped out.