Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well

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Tim Heerdink enters a nightmare landscape full force with his second full-length collection, Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well. Following in a similar vein of The Human Remains, the poet captures alternate realities within sleep, bringing forth all that is strange & unwell in the process. Talking in his sleep, Heerdink tackles abnormal mental health along with traumas in a hell of his own creation.

Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well is a haunted house. Each poem here another door rattling unlocked and opening on another nightmare, another monster, another ideation within myriad visions of hell. This is a walk through the dark side of imagination, poems where the last breath is crystalized like the soft focus of a stereoscope. Heerdink’s poems have that same burned hoarse whisper as Marlon Brando at the apocalypse end: the horror, the horror, the horror.

- Jason Baldinger, author of A History of Backroads Misplaced: Selected Poems 2010-20

Is poetry dead? Does poetry still matter? Can poetry make a difference? Save a life? Even one life? Your own? Is poetry a healing art? Can poetry possibly be the path away from death in life? From suicide? Can you write your way out of the darkness? Or is life filled with too much damn pain for even poetry to save us? In Somniloquy & Trauma in the Knottseau Well, the brilliant young poet Tim Heerdink struggles with these questions and more. He’s walking a tightrope. Will he make it to the other side? I sure hope so. I’m pulling for him. Read the book and discover what this bright new Indiana voice has to say. You’ll be glad you did.

- Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate