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Jim Heynen was born on a farm in Iowa and attended one of the state’s last one-room schoolhouses. Educated at the University of Iowa as a Renaissance scholar, he turned to writing poetry, novels, nonfiction, and short fiction and spent a year translating Lakota songs. He is best known for his short short stories about “the boys,” and his many works include The Boys’ House: New and Selected Stories and Standing Naked: New and Selected Poems. A member of the faculty of St. Olaf’s College, he lives with his wife in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Photograph by Doug Kurata.

QUICK TAGS
Animals
Parenthood
Illness
The Body
Death

FOLLOW US:

Sometimes a Sow

by Jim Heynen
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Sometimes a sow
couldn’t have her young.
They’d catch
in the tight gate
of her womb
and she’d lie heaving
towards death.

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  • I love how this birth poem is told in the voice...

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