Poetry. Fluid, lively, and referential, 10 MISSISSIPPI samples language from many cultural tributaries, performing sequels of celebrated twentieth-century poems, darkly riffing on advertising slogans, tongue twisters, formulaic news reports, and everyone's favorite twenty-six-letter sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Like the proverbial river that is never the same twice, Healey's poems channel the constant transformation of the modern world and embrace the human drama in all its absurd variety.
Author Hometown: MINNEAPOLIS, MN USA
About the author: Steve Healey is the author of EARTHLING and 10 MISSISSIPPI, both from Coffee House Press. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Writer's Chronicle and Rain Taxi, and his poems have appeared in the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and the journals American Poetry Review, Boston Review, FENCE, jubilat, and others. He received his MFA at University of Massachusetts-Amherst and his PhD at the University of Minnesota. He lives in Minneapolis and has recently taught at Michigan State University, Macalester College, and the University of Minnesota.
Reviews:
author site
Weston Cutter @ The Rumpus
One of Anis Shivani's 17 Most Important Poetry Books of Fall 2010 @ The Huffington Post
A. T. Grant @ Gently Read Literature
“Healey blends the sharp and the sad in such a moving way in this stunning second book, but it’s at the level of the phrase, and behind that, at the level of the idea, that something really extraordinary is going on—Healey’s perspective constantly reinvents itself in striking ways. Though these poems are rangy, Healey nonetheless keeps each one focused on a single theme, which is, in turn, a facet of an elaborate mirror that shows us ourselves, our difficulty, and our promise, refracted through an unremittingly honest world—‘Not a day ends without the sun totally surrendering.’ Brilliant and deeply moving.”
—Cole Swensen
“This is a powerful book, a great book of urgent knowledge. What art does when it tells us awful things in ways so beautifully made creates a rip in our spirit where deeper and real truth can get in. Healey brings together children’s games, survival tactics, reports of war, reports of violence on the Mississippi River, various instances of hide and seek, tensions between hunter and prey, in language tuned up to exquisitely arresting and inevitable wavelengths. I love 10 MISSISSIPPI.”
—Dara Wier