PASSING - Softcover

Healy, Eloise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1888996544 ISBN 13: 9781888996548

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2002

Synopsis

“Between little corner taquerias/ and Thai home cooking joints,” Eloise Klein Healy renders a post-modern Los Angeles, weaving elegies, lyrics and meditations into a provocative assemblage. She anchors the book with poems exploring gender identity and social relations, meditating on the Civil Rights movement (“our unnatural disaster over race”), the scourges of breast cancer and AIDS. She elegizes sister-poet Lynda Hull and honors the “oldest human assignment”―burying a parent. Read this collection for its wisdom, rage, and wry wit, for Healy’s intelligent probing into contemporary culture.

―Robin Becker, author of The Horse Fair

About this title

About the Author

Eloise Klein Healy, Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita at Antioch University Los Angeles, is the author of seven books of poetry: The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho (Red Hen Press 2007); Passing (Red Hen Press 2002); Artemis in Echo Park (Firebrand 1991); Ordinary Wisdom (Red Hen Press 2005); A Packet Beating Like a Heart (Books of a Feather 1981); and Building Some Changes (Beyond Baroque 1976). The newest, A Wild Surmise, will be published by Red Hen in Spring 2013. Healy's work is widely anthologized in collections such as California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present; The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave; and Another City: Writing from Los Angeles. Healy is the founder of Antioch University's MFA in Creative Writing program and the founder of Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press specializing in the work of lesbian authors. Healy is the co-founder of Eco-Arts, an ecotourism/arts venture. Books Available:

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

SOMETHING FOR THE PORTUGESE

I know it's not honest work
to be a pet and so do they.

I feel guilty that I keep them
from their real occupation

So, just as a reminder
of who they really are,

they sometimes don't come
when called,

which is fine with me
except when we're out in the yard

and what I'm wanting from them
is that they not eat all the grass

and behave like sheep
being wolves under those

black and wooly coats.
That they come to me--

homeless animal that I am in this world--
and tell me how it used to be.

About this edition

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1888996544
• ISBN 13: 9781888996548
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88