About the Book
In The Human Remains, poet Tim Heerdink puts his own twist on the perennial admonition, Memento Mori remember death. Just as the philosopher Socrates exhorted: the unexamined life is not worth living, Heerdink reminds us that bone and flesh will turn to dust soon enough. In the depths of horror, Heerdink conjures the ghosts of the Holocaust in "Outside the Walls of Concentration" witness the slaughter of a people reduced to numbers, but then leads the reader to levity in "Confessions Heard by Eavesdropping" while flirting with presumption of grace against the temptation of infidelity and, perhaps, even death itself.
The poet tenaciously clings to life and the hereafter, despite the undertow of death and its cold, hard grasp, breathing out to both the quick and the dead, the dying and the undead. His poetry reveals the dichotomy of human life, that while there is still time to wake, there is no escape; all that remains is a grave. Ever reminding the suicidal and the terminally ill of the brevity of life, nevertheless, Heerdink affirms that it hurts to be a man who often contemplates / the end; or hears the voice of the dead inside an echo. Though the poet tells the reader, I'm alive, we know that death comes for all the living - late or soon - invited or otherwise. Yet, behold, the human remains; yes, the human remains. -- The Publisher
About the Author :
Tim Heerdink is the author of Red Flag and Other Poems (Bird Brain Publishing, 2018) and president of the Midwest Writers Guild. His short story, The Tithing of Man, won first place in the guild's annual anthology contest. He also has several of his poems published in Poetry Quarterly, Fish Hook, the Midwest Writers Guild's Shared Words, Distinct Voices and The Eye of the Storyteller, and All Poetry's On Earth as it is in Poetry. Heerdink graduated from University of Southern Indiana with a Bachelor of Arts in English and currently resides in Newburgh, Indiana with his wife, Amber, daughter, Audrey, and their two cats.
Review :
"The Human Remains attempts to come to terms with [life and death and everything that exists in between] through a personal narrative of free verse poetry. Tim is also a student of the written word and is influenced by writers like Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and W. H. Auden but has developed his own strong voice." --William Sovern, Beat Poet Laureate of Indiana, vocalist of Shakespeare's Monkey, author of The Architecture of Me
"The Human Remains explores resilience, the struggle to remain upright, the inevitable fall that requires us to choose between getting back up or not, the consequences that follow, and how unseen intervention sometimes alters the results of those choices." --Sheri L. Wright, author of In the Hall of Specters and nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Kentucky Poet Laureate
"These singing lyrics and visceral elegies are evidence of hard-fought survival in the bleakest of times, historical and personal. Read this book and live." - Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer and Maybe the Saddest Thing, winner of the Pushcart Prize, and poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review
"Tim Heerdink takes a more personal tone in his latest poetry collection, The Human Remains. Leading readers on a tour of death, disaster, forgiveness, faith, marriage, and family, he makes stops at the Garden of Gethsemane, a Nazi concentration camp, and Ireland in 1916. This, more than anything, is a book that celebrates survival." --Tom Raithel, author of Dark Leaves, Strange Light
"I applaud Tim Heerdink's honesty in his book, The Human Remains. In his opening poem, a hungry child holds up an empty plate to his father. Throughout Tim's book, with the help of faith, family, and poetry, the empty plate is filled." --Mark Williams, author of Happiness
"To open The Human Remains and suck the marrow of its ink is a reader's equivalent of parting parched lips, allowing the water that is Heerdink's words to quench the fires of depression, despair, and suicide. We've all been to dark places in our lives, but we can never truly say we've seen The Human Remains until we've dived headfirst into the mind of this old soul, who survived something that has cost countless lives." --Jon Koker, author of Son
"Heerdink has done it again. Another fine collection of thought-provoking verse." --Mike Whicker, author of Valhalla Won
