The rope

Poetry. David Watson has called Heyen "one of our most original and urgent poets at the end of this century." Dave Smith has described Heyen as "standing in the line of the Emersonian visionary," and Joyce Carol Oates has praised him as a poet of "wild, radiant audacity." Responding to Heyen's earlier book of ecology poems, Pterodactyl Rose, Karl Shapiro said that Heyen was our first poet to understand gasoline. Readers of THE ROPE will realize that they are in the presence of one of America's most powerful poets as he explores--in a voice that is clear, darkly beautiful, resonant--the central questions that confront us in the 21st century.