Safe Houses I Have Known

(Paperback)

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This is Steves third collection with CHP, and were excited that this book continues to show off Steves adeptness with current events/culture and wordplay but is much more personal in scope and tone. Steve does an excellent job drawing in references to popular culture, from CIA training manuals to Spy vs. Spy, situating his poems almost viscerally in a time and place.
This book provides an interesting backdrop against which to examine certain kinds of white male paranoia currently on display in the US and adds to the political and cultural discourse in surprising ways.

Reviews

Pairing formal poetic lines with conceptually driven fragments, Healey carves a space for innovation within received forms. By blending personal narrative and found language, he evokes, and reverses, the power dynamics implicit in surveillance. Publishers Weekly

Through clever wordplay, Safe Houses I Have Known aptly conjures the terror of a world where everyone watches everyone. Shelf Awareness

Poems are immediate. They bring human reality to code words, clandestine terminology, ruse and deception . . . Throughout we discover Healey's superlative skill in conveying emotion through poetry. Decatur Daily

With skillfully rendered domestic detail and tension, Steve HealeysSafe Houses I Have Knowndiscloses that there is scant buffer between civilian life and espionage. Rupture, as documented here, is silentfrom private childhood shame, muted haiku of cartoon violence, to critical erasures of CIA interrogation protocols. Through such uneasy quiet, Healeys chilling collection confides that conflict is intimate, no matter how much language a global superpower encodes to insist otherwise.Douglas Kearney

Steve Healeys an N of 1: a poet whose father was a spy for the CIA. Hes written a wonderful book that gets at the nature and difficulty of trustnot just a sons trust in his spy pops or in a family broken up by secrecy, but in the self when we know our bodies let us down, in the other when love is often fraught and contingent. Healey goes at the complexity of our attachments with a style and verve that pushes against the burden of the material: what is weighty is also buoyant in poems that jump and swerve thanks to the playfulness of his mind and language. If trust is an issue here, by infusing new life into whatever they touch, Healeys poems are also embodiments of faith in the transformative and unifying qualities of art. Bob Hicok

Steve Healeys brilliant Safe Houses I Have Known is a riveting, unsparing account of his particular familial experience: having a father who was a CIA spy. The fractious effects of the family secret (revealed to Healey in early adolescence but felt throughout childhood) become our commonality. Through scrupulous intelligence, dark wit, and his generous yet wily imagination, Healey lays bare the disassociation and guilt of our complicity in our countrys practices of self-surveillance, military coups, lies, and deceit. Through his command of poetic forms and his mash-ups of CIA training manuals, icons of a childhoods innocenceGeorge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, the board game Clue, Geppettoall become an eerie meaninglessness. It shows that the Cold War was never over, rendering us all famous and afraid. Such a clear-eyed portrait is rare, as is the presence of both horror and love. Though I felt the recognition of Healeys warning to us and to our countryit is safer not to finish anythingI couldnt put this book down. Gillian Conoley

Praise for Steve Healey

Steve Healey blends the sharp and the sad in such a moving way in this stunning second book, but its at the level of the phrase, and behind that, at the level of the idea, that something really extraordinary is going onHealeys perspective constantly reinvents itself in striking ways. Though these poems are rangy, Healey nonetheless keeps each one focused on a single theme, which is, in turn, a facet of an elaborate mirror that shows us ourselves, our difficulty, and our promise, refracted through an unremittingly honest worldNot a day ends without the sun totally surrendering. Brilliant and deeply moving. Cole Swensen

Steve Healeys dazzling first book of poems, Earthling, will leave you reeling. Poem after poem, bold imagination coupled with intense passion sets this book ablaze. His very unique sense of humor adds to the delight. James Tate

These poems are so enlivened they seem to have yeast in them. In every one, the consequences of a single thought or action expand to the ends of the alphabet. They talk right at you as if there were no tomorrow, but in the best of all possible finales, decide that there is. Mary Ruefle

Despite the national craze for self-expression that poetry has become, it is harder than ever to hear an original voice; but here one is and its a doozy. Somehow Steve Healey has figured out a way to get a new sound out of the saxophone of English. Loopy, smart, eyebrow-raising, wiggy, and wildly entertaining belong in the string of modifiers that would try to describe this poets amazing voice. Billy Collins

This is a powerful book, a great book of urgent knowledge. What art does when it tells us awful things in ways so beautifully made creates a rip in our spirit where deeper and real truth can get in. Healey brings together childrens games, survival tactics, reports of war, reports of violence on the Mississippi River, various instances of hide-and-seek, tensions between hunter and prey, in language tuned up to exquisitely arresting and inevitable wavelengths. I love 10 Mississippi.Dara Wier

Comically obsessive, meditative in wonderfully askew ways, Healeys poems signal the melding of a frisky poetics with a weighted consciousness of peril: political, environmental, personal. Explorative of an often hostile, chaotic yet exquisite and wounded world, with a matter-of-fact authority that leads sometimes to the miraculous, sometimes the absurd, sometimes stark truths, 10 Mississippi delights with the buoyancy of invention and scares with the law, the final black / that comes after dusk. Reader, prepare for your training wheels to fall off. Dean Young

10 Mississippi reveals the sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful truth of our daily lives. Healey offers us our shining memories of childhood innocence, and then, just as earnestly, the abrupt but enduring realization that life will never again be so easy. Verse Wiconsin

10 Mississippi is a startlingly rich and absorbing read that also stakes a claim to big ideas, and does so using the sort of simple yet endlessly inventive metrics equally familiar to precocious children and the very best poets of our times. Highly recommended. Huff Post Books

Author Bio

Steve Healey is the author of two previous books of poetry, 10 Mississippi and Earthling, both from Coffee House Press. His poems have been published in magazines such as American Poetry Review, the Awl, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Jubilat, and in anthologies, most recently The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Hes a professor of English and creative writing at Minneapolis College.