What the Right Hand Knows

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.