Stephanie Heit’s Psych Murders starts with a warning and a promise that draws us in and acts as comfort as well as trigger notice. In “Admission Threshold,” Heit holds the door open into psychiatric treatment, allows us to stand in the doorway, the “safest and strongest part of a structure,” as we take a cautious “step into the unknown.” This step forward—and into—is “an act of faith”; an act of faith made possible by the poet’s care, honesty, and vulnerability, which enables us to trust the poet as guide despite the journey into someplace frightening, a place of disability most would rather ignore. Because this poetry collection is not an involuntary psych hold, we have the choice to leave—the poet gives us agency (denied to many seeking treatment for mental difference) as well as permission if we become overwhelmed; yet Heit’s openness and frankness make it difficult to close our eyes. Psych Murders is a much-needed “shadow text” countering the dangerous and dominant ableist narrative of what it means to be normal or capable. This social model of disability teaches us to fear own minds and bodies if those minds and bodies don’t fit societal expectations. The cost is living in Limbo and serving a system of privilege—the accepted, abled, heteronormative ideal—at the cost of everyone else’s rights.
Through stunning and intense imagery Heit shows our inherently ableist society, how each disabled person is treated as interchangeable, until only setting, only “material’s memory” is left. The same treatment (ECT) that supposedly fixes individuals seems to erase individuality even as “sensation[s]” and “sounds” slowly return “like a distant sea.” But even after recovering, memory is hazy or absent; the speaker could “order the hospital records for accuracy” but what would that help? She is left with an “headache of seismic proportions,” the “brain” beaten like “a tambourine.” What remains? With unflinching honesty, and a drop of dark humor, Heit tells us what is left is anesthesia, nameless bodies in locked rooms, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest playing on the rec room TV.
But who makes us nameless? Within these poems, Heit skillfully shows us how language can save or kill, how it perpetrates dangerously ableist notions, the way medical professionals might “tell [themselves] this is ok,” that they are “whitecoat messiah[s] do-gooding into oblivion.” Soon enough, these so-called do-gooders have gaslighted us into adopting their dangerous terminology like the “promises of Better” that read more “fortune teller than MD,” “superstition than science.” The truth is our words are “taxidermy butterflies” held by “carefully placed pins and containers preserv[ing]” the ableist ideal. And Heit does mean our words since medical professionals are not the only whitecoats denying the memory loss and traumatic brain injury caused by so-called treatments; and if these negative effects don’t exist, “rehab or support groups for what does not happen” aren’t necessary and don’t exist either. To better understand this sense of helplessness, the poet gives us a single survivor in an “open sea” left to her own devices to swim or sink as if she doesn’t exist at all.
In several poems Heit compares mental difference with the natural world reminding us that this difference is not abnormal or freaky, just a different kind of natural. “Mad Flora and Fauna Catalog: Turtle” includes a turtle as metaphor, which is often used to symbolize slowness, lethargy, depression, but Heit beautifully makes that familiar image her own. The speaker becomes a turtle crossing the road, never knowing if she will get hit and smashed by a car or not. Part the decision to cross, part fate of passing cars, at the mercy of others’ expectations. Yet turtling—slow and steady towards that “shore and light”—doesn’t have to be discouraging. Isn’t this how the way forward to mental health works?
Yes, Heit cleverly shows how language can either create or strip us of our uniqueness, of our personhood. How often do we hear slurs like freak, whack job, psycho? How often do we hear the phrase that chick was crazy in bed to mean out of control, thrill-seeking, self-destructive? Heit won’t let us forget the incorrect assumption that bipolar girls are “sexy” when manic with “god-like confidence and unlimited energy” or full of surprises, “rubbing on streetpoles pure libido oozing” as an “invitation.” As if a bipolar girl is “fuck ready [..] if you are brave enough to mess with crazy.” As if daring to have sex with a crazy chick is a badge of courage, a dance with otherness that will leave you with a wild, crazy story to tell your friends over a beer. The bipolar girl becomes dehumanized, objectified, and stereotyped for entertainment.
In “Mad Flora and Fauna Catalog: Hyena” the speaker describes the manic side as on the “prowl on the edges of the other worlds” until “red of inside meets outside” and “cuts on [her] arm release the pressure” as if a valve. In addition to turtle and hyena, Heit also introduces kudzu, a “chronic plant” that “strangles out the foliage: soul crushers!” The kudzu “thrives” and “multiples,” overtaking until not even the memory of what was survives, not even breadcrumbs left to show the way back; instead, you absorb the language and ideas of the whitecoats, drink the “poison” that “tastes good” because it provides some kind of an answer, even if it is untrue.
Heit uses clever and precise metaphors to illustrate an ecosystem; turtle, hyena, kudzu symbolize aspects of a mental difference experience—depression, mania, institutionalization—but only together does the whole bionetwork emerge. To complete this picture, Heit doesn’t just give us the speaker’s perspective. In “The Murderer: Murder Defense,” we learn that he considers himself a “good guy” whose story gets “twist[ed]” by the speaker in a he-said-she-said love affair in which the speaker was the pursuer. In this scenario, the murderer gaslights the victim as if in an abusive relationship.
In “Dear Murderer,” the speaker addresses him directly by writing a “goodbye sonnet” stating that she has won this “contest of wills,” that her “survivor body [is] on firmer ground.” He had his chance when she was “fair game. Repeat offender. Psych system ingrate.” But this isn’t just an individual’s triumph or rebellion. Heit gives advice for others with mental difference—she gives us The Resistance via a manifesto written on a napkin. This secret napkin speaks the unspoken truth about a “luxury vacation” treatment with “unbelievable success rates” that is nothing but “propaganda.” And we believe these lies because we want to, and sometimes because we are “at a loss for what to do […] because we are taught the ones with the white coats & MD by their names know best.”
The note from the Resistance tells us to “make like normate[s]” and “get the hell out.” By telling us to “retract” consent, Heit reminds us that we still have agency. And that getting help should never negate one’s power. That we can resist, find support, and survive. In the final poem, “Testament,” we see the speaker in multiplicity, how we can be “cutter,” “killer,” and “pill taker,” as well as “wonder,” “siren,” and “still life version of survival.” We can be a site of “insults” and “goodwill,” as well as “miracle” and a “72-hour hold castaway.” We can be “a second chance, a third, a fourth.” Being a mix of beauty and sadness and joy and trouble is not a bad thing. And not someone to be fixed.
Psych Murders, by Stephanie Heit. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, September 2022. 150 pages. $17.99, paper.
Kara Dorris is the author of two poetry collections: Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body Is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press. She has also published five chapbooks including Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me], co-written with Gwendolyn Paradice (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, RHINO, Tinderbox, Tupelo Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, and Crazyhorse, among others, as well as the anthology Beauty Is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Waxwing, Breath and Shadow, and the anthology The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 
Leave a comment