Itch

Half-familiar images of wedding-dresses and rabbit-fur stoles, entombed queens and abandoned women, are used to shape a sharp, modern collection. These poems are of our world: they tread the line, as we all must, between containment and confinement, balancing freedom from institutions against loneliness. Ultimately, the speaker triumphs over her helplessness. Though alienated physically and socially, these poems stand as her expression of protest. In this collection whether gleefully inciting moths to destruction or blazing out against climate change Heinen uses language as power.