This is a brilliant book of poetry-memoir-witness that crosses many borders and shines a naked and daring light on the horrors of psychic suffering at critical levels beyond the pale of endurance. Stephanie Heit transforms her horrors and scars into a palpable wisdom to benefit others in this magnificent testament to love and survival. She is a starling word- and world-worker and a compassionate, original voice in the wilderness. I bow at her investigative bravery, the loneliness of the journey. 'The brain as abandoned city that just needs some light' is a searing analogy we should all wake up to recognize.
~Anne Waldman
Drawn from the vivid, hallucinatory medical notes Stephanie Heit took during inpatient treatment, Psych Murders opens with addresses to the Psych Murderer, a sociopathic bureaucratic persona that feels like an internalized form of the institution: 'You live invisible in the blur of my eye.' The psychiatric institutional setting—with its clinical apparatuses of electroshock treatment—'architected to increase anxiety,' restructures the body and Heit's lines into alternative choreographies, the twitch of synaptic decoherence. The body incorporates the sum total of its treatments and diagnoses—and is a 'DSM-V masterpiece,' which can also be said of the book itself, a devastating and exhilarating read!
~Vidhu Aggarwal
Stephanie Heit's Psych Murders bears witness to shock treatments, psychiatric wards, and medical interventions. Here suicidal ideation takes the life of an inner murderer, personified. This hybrid lyric memoir pulls no punches. 'I play with pills, pistols, plastics. In my mind. Siren red. Maize and blue of the University Hospital where everyone knows my name.' Harrowing and brave; illuminating and haunting.
~Hoa Nguyen
With tender consideration in the midst of profound psychic pain, Heit guides readers through the journey of psychiatric treatment to confront the 'murderer' in the mind. Suicidal ideation 'crowds out beauty,' but these poems are lucidly crystalline songs of light; not the doctor's interrogative glare but lanterns shining us home.
~Roxanna Bennett
Psych Murders is a tightly woven and lyrical exposé of the flexibility and failure of language when it remains an accomplice to our collective socialization under ableism. This is necessary and dangerous work, and it is a stunning addition to the crip canon.
~Meg Day
In Psych Murders, Heit invites the reader into her innermost world. No matter the readers' experience with mental health (and the mental health system in the U.S.), they'll be able to learn and better understand the challenges that bipolar people and those who experience suicidal ideation face. Although the speaker tells The Murderer, "You crowd out beauty," the beauty of Heit's words, observations and rhythms make this poetry-memoir hybrid an important and revelatory book.
~Liz DeGregorio
Psych Murders is a much-needed 'shadow text' countering the dangerous and dominant ableist narrative of what it means to be normal or capable.
~Kara Dorris
