What the Right Hand Knows
Inside
- Chorus of Animals
- The Anesthesiologist's Kiss
- Milk-Truck Driver
- Local or Strange
- What the Right Hand Knows
- My Orbit
- Living on Someone Else's Money
- Phocion's Wife
- The Only Fruit
- Learning to Land
- The View From Here
- A Possum Entering the Argument
Buy
Four Way Books • Amazon • Indie Bound
About
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.” An intimate, intelligent, and lively debut.