10 Mississippi Format: Paperback

Playful but ominous, 10 Mississippi reads like a game of hide-and-seek set in America’s rising floodwaters of text and technology.

Fluid, lively, and referential, 10 Mississippi samples language from many cultural tributaries, performing sequels of celebrated twentieth-century poems, 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 a way that makes them a joy to read and revisit.

Steve Healey is the author of two previous books of poetry, 10 Mississippi and Earthling, both from Coffee House Press. His poems have been published in magazines such as American Poetry Review, the Awl, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Jubilat, and in anthologies, most recently The New Census: an Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. He’s a professor of English and creative writing at Minneapolis College.