Over the decades Heyen has most often thought, studied, and written about the Holocaust. His groundbreaking collection The Swastika Poems (Vanguard Press, 1977) was revised and expanded to Erika (1984). Thirteen more of these poems appear in Falling from Heaven (Time Being Books, 1991).

Shoah Train collects more than seventy poems written over the last dozen years, lyrics of “discipline and honesty and courage and restraint”, as Archibald MacLeish described The Swastika Poems. Experiencing the new poems in Shoah Train, readers will find themselves in the presence of one of the US's most important poets.