What the Right Hand Knows (Heftet (myke permer))

TOM HEALY'S poems and essays have appeared in BOMB, the Yale Review, Paris Review, Tin House, Salmagundi and other journals. He studied at Harvard and Columbia. He lives in New York City and Miami.

Healy's sensual, urgent debut collection moves from farmyard to cityscape as it depicts a teetering, asymmetric world. A speaker 'deaf in one ear' ponders that 'the Moon's dark side/has no sound'; a mother and child finally 'take the journey they'd talked about' but get only 'a Sunday drive on Tuesday', a near-miss 'tracing circumferences'. Healy's assured rhythms and measured stresses ballast the uncertainty of social relationships and bodily suffering. He seeks past the self for ways to act: 'the task is to remember/the troubled blood of others, /and not remember/the bliss of deeper waters'. This book of 'salt and work', of surviving ourselves, our illnesses, and our language, tenderly explores the unsaid and under-the-surface of the separate lives we live together: 'we sat/in the rocking chairs/of each other's/moods'. This is an intimate, intelligent, and lively debut.