Review
Ribbons...is an ambitious, bitter, damning take on the senseless brutality of "this war-to-continue-wars," this "hundred-day slaughter." It is also a wake-up call to the poetry establishment: "The crisis of poetry reoccurs with each newscast, how it can't hide forever in impenetrable shelters under a camouflage of soil and trees." --
The ProgressiveMr. Heyen deconstructs Operation Desert Storm to expose the perverse irony of terms like "smart weapons" and "surgically clean" air strikes....It is difficult to swim against a rush of sentimental patriotism and harder still to write convincing poems about such matters. Mr. Heyen accomplishes both, often with compelling insight. --
New York Times Book Review
About the Author
William Heyen was born in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. His undergraduate degree is from State University of New York at Brockport, where he is a professor of English and poet in residence; his graduate degrees are from Ohio University. A former senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature to Germany, he has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from
Poetry magazine, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His writing has appeared in many periodicals, including
American Poetry ReviewM,
Harper's,
TriQuarterly,
Ontario Review,
The New Yorker, and
The Southern Review, and in more than a hundred anthologies.
