A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings

Description

A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings is Eloise Klein Healy's seventh book of poetry and the first that includes an audio component. Included are poems from all her previous collections, including her award-winning first collection, Building Some Changes, as well as Artemis In Echo Park and The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho. Healy's work is immediately recognizable as poetry written by a woman under the influence of feminism, freeway traffic, wilderness (especially in the city), and a uniquely tuned sense of craft. Her work travels easily across time zones, mythologies, the politics of love, and the inevitable loss of family and friends. She searches for a lesbian tradition in literature, lamenting the erasure of lesbian writers and the fragmented history of their work. But Healy's poetry is not without humor, nor does it shy away from such topics as baseball and the companionship of canines. Like life, poetry to her is "a wild surmise"----never totally translatable, but always worth the attempt.

Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six previous books of poetry and three spoken word recordings. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles where she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita. Healy 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. She is the founding editor of Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press specializing in the work of lesbian authors. A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings is her seventh book of poems.

"I first read Eloise Klein Healy's wonderful and deceptively simple poem 'What Is Being Forgotten' sometime in the seventies, and I am happy to say that I never forgot. That unassuming lyric built on itself over the years--as did its speaker, living and forging this beguiling collection of poems as lyrics that still work with simple but which turn simplicity around in the hand, showing us the intimacy of all its sides, wild included. 'I didn't need saving, /just revising, ' says the speaker in one poem. This is sacred, discovered ground, and I am happy to share in the hold of what is being remembered." --Alberto Rios "Why do I love Eloise's poetry? Because it is so rooted in her love of LA, and other sacred places only Eloise would know. She celebrates so lovingly the sensual bodies of neighborhood, cars, beach, freeway, lover, creature--she places us all the way into the life cycles of reality. This collection is witty, sensual, full of sagacity and surprise, exquisitely beautiful. Fine poetry to be read again and again."--Judy Grahn "A Wild Surmise is full of appreciation for the physical--from the freeways of LA and ball bearings pouring into a pan to the sun smell of her dog's fur. From chili-flakes in a shaker to Greek scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. And through these vivid moments we are given glimpses into the life of a lesbian poet and the culture in which she wrote beginning in the 70s and continuing to the present. Reading Eloise Klein Healy's New & Selected Poems is like sitting down with a dear friend with a strong cup of tea or a glass of wine and being given the gift of a deep and generous sharing."--Ellen Bass "A Wild Surmise shows Healy to be a disciplined, polished poet with a vision that's unfailingly open and generous. As Healy cares for the people close to her, or mourns them, her emotions take residence in the city's natural and built environments, landscapes that feel at once exotic and familiar, cruel and welcoming." --The Los Angeles Times "How to let a reader know the way Healy can, in one volume, capture the verve and essence of Los Angeles, the history and cultural legacy of Sappho, and the vital dichotomy of love and mortality, while still leaving room to write about her dogs? Like this, I suppose: read this book. It's worth it." --Lambda Literary Review "What a delight it is to have gathered here these poems from previous collections--as well as new poems--from a poet I have admired for years. Eloise Klein Healy's straightforward and wry wit underscores her wisdom and the peacefulness that comes from a deeply humane emotional and intellectual knowledge. A Wild Surmise touches on so many things with such clarity and precision it's like having a handbook to guide us through the world."--Natasha Trethewey