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Today's poem is "The Suicide's Numbers"
from Passing

Red Hen Press

Eloise Klein Healy is the author of five books of poetry: Building Some Changes (Beyond Baroque Foundation), A Packet Beating Like a Heart (Books Of A Feather Press), Ordinary Wisdom (Paradise Press), and Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books), which was nominated for the Lambda Book Award and released as a spoken word recording by New Alliance Records. Women’s Studies Chronicles, a chapbook, was published by The Inevitable Press in the Laguna Poets Series. Her work has been widely anthologized in collections including The World In Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave, The Geography Of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals; Grand Passion: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond; and Another City: Writing From Los Angeles. She has also published bio-bibliographic reviews of the poets Muriel Rukeyser and Elsa Gidlow. Ms. Healy has been awarded artist’s residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Dorland Mountain Colony. She was the Grand Prize winner of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival Competition, and she has received grants from The California Arts Council and the CSUN Merit Award Program. She directed the Women’s Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. The founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles, Healy is also the co-founder of ECO-ARTS, an ecotourism/arts venture.

About Passing:

"Eloise Klein Healy writes poems that refuel my heart. When I read her words, I am pinned by all we're up against—from reactionary politics to the plight of aging parents—but the poems also offer the necessary grit, that combination of compassion and tenacity, which makes it possible to be glad for the chance to walk on two legs. Reading this book, I am reminded why there must be poetry in the world, especially now."
—Tim Seibles

"Healy is at the top of her form in this book. Check out "Louganis," a beautiful sestina about beauty and HIV. You'd say the woman is all heart, except that her "craft" is so good. The poet's elegies are filled with joy's memory and power, her lust insists on the rights and rites of the body--and her anger is aflame."
—Alicia Ostriker

"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



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